21st Century Datacenter Locations Driven by 19th Century Politics

Google recently announced the availability of a new datacenter in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is the latest in datacenter investments by Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and others, distributed along a line corresponding to the 41st parallel in the United States:

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Each of these companies are investing billions of dollars into these four cities:

What is so special about the 41st parallel that would make so many different companies invest billions of dollars to build datacenters in these cities? It’s because the vast bulk of east/west data traffic in the United States passes through each of these cities via the largest collection of fiber optic cables from the highest diversity of telecommunication companies: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Level 3, Zayo, Fibertech, Windstream and others. 

This fiber optic infrastructure provides the datacenters with unprecedented access to the absolute highest bandwidth in a virtuous cycle of investment: more datacenters drive more traffic, which drives more fiber optic cables, which drives more datacenters. 

Why did all of these telecommunication companies choose to locate their fiber cabling along this specific route across the United States? It’s because each of these cables are buried in the contiguous 200-foot right-of-way alongside the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. The United States government granted these land rights to the Union Pacific railroad via the Pacific Railway Act of 1862. If you’re a telecommunication company wishing to deploy new fiber across the United States, you only need to negotiate with a single entity: the Union Pacific railroad. Their single strip of land completely bisects the United States, as shown by the original railway survey completed in 1864:

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One of the best examples of this telecommunication co-location is the main uplink facility for EchoStar in Cheyenne, Wyoming. EchoStar maintains a fleet of 25 geostationary satellites for media broadcasting and film distribution. EchoStar purchased a large plot of land directly adjacent to the Union Pacific right of way, enabling them to directly tie into the transcontinental fiber cables buried next to the railroad. 

The image below shows the property lines recorded with the City of Cheyenne. You can clearly see the northern property line of EchoStar aligning with the Union Pacific right of way:

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Another example in Cheyenne are the separate datacenters for Microsoft and NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center. Both of these are located within a half mile of the Union Pacific railroad:

Microsoft Datacenter in Cheyanne, Wyoming

Why was the first transcontinental railroad built along the 41st parallel from Council Bluffs, Iowa to Sacramento, California? Starting in 1853, the United States conducted Pacific surveys to map the best transcontinental route for a railway: along the 47th parallel, 39th parallel, 35th parallel and 32nd parallel. In 1859 the US Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, strongly favored the southerly railroad route from New Orleans to San Diego: it was shorter, had no major mountains to traverse, and had lower operational costs due to lack of snowfall to clear from the tracks. However, in the 1850s no Congressman from a northern state would have voted for a southerly railroad route to aid the Confederacy's slave-based economy, and no Congressman from the south would have voted for a northerly route. This stalemate lasted until the start of the US Civil War. When the southern states seceded from the Union in 1861, the remaining northern politicians quickly voted and passed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 which fixed the starting location of the transcontinental railway at Council Bluffs, Iowa, heading west along the 41st parallel. 

Why was Council Bluffs, Iowa on the 41st parallel chosen as the starting point? There were many competing towns who were lobbying for the privilege. Council Bluffs was picked because the Platte River valley, due west of the city, formed an unbroken 600-mile gentle rise across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, providing the steam locomotives with a good source of water for their boilers. This same river water is now used for the adiabatic cooling of the modern datacenters along this route.

After the first railway was completed, Western Union immediately established the first telecommunications corridor within the railroad right of way and was soon carrying all transcontinental telegrams. Later, as AT&T established long distance voice lines in the early-20th century, those same lines were also placed along the first transcontinental railroad. This collection of early lines grew and expanded to the vast collection of telecommunication options available in this corridor today.

Thus, political actions from over 150 years ago now dictates the location of billions of dollars of modern datacenter investments.

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George Moore is the CTO of Microsoft Azure Global Engineering, and one of the co-founders of the Azure Engineering team in 2006. He designed and built a large portion of the core Azure infrastructure over the last 13 years.

David Swanson, PE, SE, F. SEI

Award-Winning Professional Engineer and AEC Executive

3y

This is fascinating.

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Reply
Michael Bolls

Senior Business Intelligence Analyst at PerkSpot

4y

Amazing how decisions made hundreds of years ago can impact decisionmaking today! Makes one wonder what decisions being made today will have impact 200+ years from now and so forth.

nice story about yet another monopoly :) thanks for the sharing!

Patrick Slavenburg

Entrepreneur. Pathfinder. Also advised OECD on Digital; DigitalSME + EU Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

4y

What a fascinating story. I had never heard of it before!

C R

Enterprise IT Manager

4y

brilliant thank you for sharing! 

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