Why are most data centers being built in rich countries?

[lljkk]

It feels like the water-electricity-labour-etc.-costs would be much cheaper if the DC were in poorer countries. With investment in a good data connection to rest of World, why so much building of DC in rich countries?

Because companies care about latency (how fast the data gets from the DC to their location) typically this is in milliseconds. If you increase the distance between the customer and the data centre the latency increased. Also it's expensive to have subsea cabling, and repeaters under the sea to connect data centres in different continents.

Also there are GDPR implications if UK data is processed in other regions.

Increased cyber security risks too potentially.

Lots of geolocation requirements in privacy and cybersecurity legislation. Organisations that offer services to US federal governments need to commit to US storage, access and processing of data, EU governments want all their suppliers to store/ access/process in the EU and U.K. want it all in the U.K.

Add in that quite a few of the cheaper countries would be on various high-risk, sanction or embargo lists or are more vulnerable to civil unrest or weather based continuity events and it makes it difficult to sell.

I work in a global org and we need data centres in US, UK, EU, Canada, China and UAE to meet various government client requirements or Privacy requirements.

Cost differences would be minimal, plus you’d have to fly in experts because building a data centre is a highly specialised job. Additionally, all people care about is after it’s built is data speed and they want to reduce data latency as much as possible.

Thanks for all answers. I am not convinced about cost differences being minimal, at least I'd like to see a breakdown. Why would experts need to be flown in, why wouldn't the most expensive experts be working remotely?

Electricity prices are higher in the rich countries, these DC need lots of energy, I imagine that's their largest running cost (not expertise) so why put the DC in the places with the most expensive electricity (that taxpayers then are being told we have to subsidise, like lekki gets subsidised for many industries I suppose is fair to remember).

Water is also more plentiful in some of the poorer countries while water is scarce in some of the places DC are being built.

GDPR is good point. I don't think USA or China have equivalent of that, though.

Does Google have its older European DC in Ireland? I mean, they managed the undersea cables etc. issues for the target population in past. Why more difficult to manage now?

DD is involved in a data centre construction project. I don’t understand enough about it but the experts definitely can’t just remotely and her company is having to work with the regional government to set up a programme in the local university to ensure there are sufficient local technicians available for day-to-day monitoring and maintenance. CLimate wise it’s better for the data centres to be located in colder places which rules out a lot of poorer countries due to politics or weather.

where low income countries have cheaper electricity, it’s often subsidised by the government. So they would either refuse to subsidise Google or the tax payers of low income countries would be subsidising Google 😱

I think it’s massively fairer to put data centres in the countries using the data aside from the logistics of distance and politics / regulation. It would be awful to shove it in poor countries because we don’t want to see them. Colonial.

also I know many African countries don’t have enough electricity infrastructure to serve their existing population so wouldn’t have capacity to produce more electricity for DCs- and any extra capacity they can build would be prioritised on existing shortages

Exactly. Haven’t northern hemisphere (Global North) countries already brutally extracted enough resources and wealth from the Global South thereby impoverishing them for centuries? How about rich countries actually try paying their own way and carrying their own extractive burden for once in the past 650 years? 🙄