Yes. Some Google Cloud zones are in Google's own data centers and some are in third-party data centers. I vaguely remember them at some point also listing those third-party data centers somewhere, but I can't find it now and might be misremembering.
I've been looking for datacenter tech job. With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier. Guess there's a lot of them being built but none near there, or are companies being secretive about that, staffing internally? Am I looking in the wrong places ? (Usual job hunting sites, linkedin)
What kind of tech? Lots of it gets contracted out, there's not that much full time staff at any given facility.
I used to travel installing Optical Networking equipment, there's definitely demand there but it's brutal travel.
You could look into the big 3rd party providers Equinix, Digital Realty, etc, they often have some openings. The main thing to consider is they have some pretty crazy shift schedules. Lots of them 12 hours 3-4 days a week with nights etc.
Microsoft is listing positions on their public job board (I know because I'm nosy and they're building a big data center complex a few miles from me). They look like good jobs for the area. A couple pay over $100K and only require a high school diploma for what looks to be essentially security guard roles.
> With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier.
Data centers don't need very many employees once they are built, many have less than 20 employees.
This is a big part of the reason why they are such a bad long term deal for localities and why giving them tax breaks, etc is just a scam. They add a lot more negative externalities than they help with the local economy.
The Mount Pleasant fairwater campus is ~1.27 square km... That's massive compared to the DC who employ only 20 people
Moreover, from the same article that you linked:
> “These aren’t short term construction jobs,” he said. “These are construction jobs that are going to take place over years and years.”
That's better than a short term-only construction job... And in the meanwhile it's possible that the rest of the local economy might also witness a boost
But once the construction will be complete, those jobs will go.
I think it's possible and likely that, per-square-meter the Mount Pleasant DCs might employ more people than other DCs, but:
- Microsoft wouldn't pay more people to do the same job that fewer could. Maybe compacting the construction of multiple massive DCs grants them some economies of scale that offset the additional costs due to the additional complexity and employment requirements... Or maybe they are building a massive project precisely because that bumps up the employment numbers, making their project more appealing for local authorities. Either way, a DC is a DC. If the employment numbers are different, we should ask ourselves why
- just because hundreds more are planned, doesn't mean that we can trust 100% those numbers will materialise: Oracle claimed force majeure to step away from a $3 billion New Mexico facility... If leases are uncommenced, any company might also be able to easily walk away
A warehouse of equivalent size in square feet often doesn't have many more employees, if it's just a bunch of truck docks and people driving forklifts.
That's also a problem but a modern one. Only a generation or two ago an industrial property of that size might employ four figures worth of hands and employ most of the neighborhood or town in question.
I was confused at first but it seems like the site lists for google products only, doesn't seem to list some of the regions google cloud is available in (such as nothing in shown in Canada). But scrolling down it has a link to Google cloud regions.
Not a Google employee. Last I recall, the only place in Africa that stood to benefit from local infrastructure was South Africa, yet because of how geographically isolated it was from the next nearest hop, latency and packet loss were just intolerable. The latter should be solvable, though the former was dependent on closer neighbors. Same goes for Australia, more or less. I’m curious why there isn’t more demand in Nigeria or Kenya though!
Wow. This is a pretty bald-faced lie by Google. They're defining "datacenter" very narrowly in a way that lets them hide their actual footprint. E.g, they're ignoring the various caches they have in the SF Bay Area, NYC, and other metropolitan locations. Back when they were running Stadia, their claim was that they had edge nodes single-digit milliseconds from major population centers. They also run their servers in datacenters which are technically not owned by "Google". That's why Google Cloud has an us-west2 near LA not on this map but their GCP site makes different claims from this website: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations
The page seems to be pretty clear that these are datacenters "owned and operated" by Google. They're not redefining "datacenter." The caches and edge PoPs are typically rented racks in partner datacenters, usually telcos and ISPs.
This page isn't new, it's just marketing for a different purpose. This one is about "owned and operated" data centers, as this is basically a careers page. The cloud page is marketing for another purpose – cloud customers. Is there really any lying going on here?
not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly. Just increases attack vector and not very value adding to people. most customers care about latency and as long as you can point to a region where you are its enough
It's local public knowledge. The buildings are registered with the county they're in and pay taxes. In the US at least, that's public info.
Odds of data centers being physically attacked at scale are low. Most of the population doesn't care enough, and the vocal minority is under a lot of scrutiny.
Finding a datacenter from aerial or space photos isn't hard if you know how to identify a heat exchanger or huge generator. Both of which are very distinctive. Then limit that search set to certain sizes of big rectangular buildings. And ones with relatively low counts of passenger cars parked during mid day times.
Yeah - they should force mapping services to blur the data center - and just the data center - on their satellite imagery. That will make it impossible for people to find them.
If the US ends up in a similar asymmetric warfare scenario, the location of corporate data centers being known is low on the priority list. Google is assuming a peacetime footing where public transparency and accountability matter.
Kinda hard to hide them when you choose to build them in people’s backyards and ask them for a local tax break. The Meta ones near me are very visible.
When I was at Google I built https://gcping.com/ for fun to measure latency to each cloud region. I'm honestly surprised it's still up!
Pretty neat. There are ton of European results in yours that do not appear in the post's site. Is that because those are colocated?
Yes. Some Google Cloud zones are in Google's own data centers and some are in third-party data centers. I vaguely remember them at some point also listing those third-party data centers somewhere, but I can't find it now and might be misremembering.
Why surprised?
Useful working tools tend to get sunset by google before long. Google earth pro is getting killed this January, get your downloads in.
I've been looking for datacenter tech job. With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier. Guess there's a lot of them being built but none near there, or are companies being secretive about that, staffing internally? Am I looking in the wrong places ? (Usual job hunting sites, linkedin)
What kind of tech? Lots of it gets contracted out, there's not that much full time staff at any given facility.
I used to travel installing Optical Networking equipment, there's definitely demand there but it's brutal travel.
You could look into the big 3rd party providers Equinix, Digital Realty, etc, they often have some openings. The main thing to consider is they have some pretty crazy shift schedules. Lots of them 12 hours 3-4 days a week with nights etc.
Microsoft is listing positions on their public job board (I know because I'm nosy and they're building a big data center complex a few miles from me). They look like good jobs for the area. A couple pay over $100K and only require a high school diploma for what looks to be essentially security guard roles.
You're fishing in a small pond with few fish. It doesn't take many people to run a DC.
> With how many are being built rn I thought it would be easier.
Data centers don't need very many employees once they are built, many have less than 20 employees.
This is a big part of the reason why they are such a bad long term deal for localities and why giving them tax breaks, etc is just a scam. They add a lot more negative externalities than they help with the local economy.
Are you sure? Microsoft hired about 500 full time employees for its first data center in Wisconsin.
https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-hired-375-people-for-moun...
Construction jobs. Those will only stay around as long as Microsoft keeps churning out additional datacenters in that local area.
Those aren't construction jobs. They're for the finished data center.
Construction is ongoing
The Mount Pleasant fairwater campus is ~1.27 square km... That's massive compared to the DC who employ only 20 people
Moreover, from the same article that you linked:
> “These aren’t short term construction jobs,” he said. “These are construction jobs that are going to take place over years and years.”
That's better than a short term-only construction job... And in the meanwhile it's possible that the rest of the local economy might also witness a boost
But once the construction will be complete, those jobs will go.
I think it's possible and likely that, per-square-meter the Mount Pleasant DCs might employ more people than other DCs, but:
- Microsoft wouldn't pay more people to do the same job that fewer could. Maybe compacting the construction of multiple massive DCs grants them some economies of scale that offset the additional costs due to the additional complexity and employment requirements... Or maybe they are building a massive project precisely because that bumps up the employment numbers, making their project more appealing for local authorities. Either way, a DC is a DC. If the employment numbers are different, we should ask ourselves why
- just because hundreds more are planned, doesn't mean that we can trust 100% those numbers will materialise: Oracle claimed force majeure to step away from a $3 billion New Mexico facility... If leases are uncommenced, any company might also be able to easily walk away
And most of them will be on unemployment or working on another location pretty soon.
A warehouse of equivalent size in square feet often doesn't have many more employees, if it's just a bunch of truck docks and people driving forklifts.
That's also a problem but a modern one. Only a generation or two ago an industrial property of that size might employ four figures worth of hands and employ most of the neighborhood or town in question.
Surprised at how few there are...
I was confused at first but it seems like the site lists for google products only, doesn't seem to list some of the regions google cloud is available in (such as nothing in shown in Canada). But scrolling down it has a link to Google cloud regions.
I assume that's only their own data centers, not where they rent space in other data centers.
And none of the on the continents of Africa or Australia.
Not a Google employee. Last I recall, the only place in Africa that stood to benefit from local infrastructure was South Africa, yet because of how geographically isolated it was from the next nearest hop, latency and packet loss were just intolerable. The latter should be solvable, though the former was dependent on closer neighbors. Same goes for Australia, more or less. I’m curious why there isn’t more demand in Nigeria or Kenya though!
They have a cloud presence in Sydney for example. They just presumably don’t own the DC because it’s too small to be worth building their own
Nobody lives there. Ten times more people live in Indonesia.
>> Africa
> Nobody lives there
Africa has just under 20% of the world's population.
I was pretty obviously responding to the Australia part.
Is population actually an issue? The cost may well be cheaper
Something is wrong as there is no Warsaw region
Interesting. Not a single data center in California.
Cost prohibitive?
It is all about power costs. Tennessee for example seems like a weird place to put a datacenter, until you read about the TVA.
Not enough people to serve.
Is this one complete? Cannot see Warsaw
If Warsaw is just a cloud region it may not be on this site.
This is a Google owned and operated data centres.
Some gcp cloud regions are just rented floorspace in DCs from equinox etc.
They won't show on here if the latter.
I thought europe-north2 was a "real" Google data center. It's not?
Wow. This is a pretty bald-faced lie by Google. They're defining "datacenter" very narrowly in a way that lets them hide their actual footprint. E.g, they're ignoring the various caches they have in the SF Bay Area, NYC, and other metropolitan locations. Back when they were running Stadia, their claim was that they had edge nodes single-digit milliseconds from major population centers. They also run their servers in datacenters which are technically not owned by "Google". That's why Google Cloud has an us-west2 near LA not on this map but their GCP site makes different claims from this website: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations
The page seems to be pretty clear that these are datacenters "owned and operated" by Google. They're not redefining "datacenter." The caches and edge PoPs are typically rented racks in partner datacenters, usually telcos and ISPs.
Edge node map didn’t get archived I see: https://web.archive.org/web/20170106184020/https://peering.g...
But “…Google has placed more than 7,500 edge nodes, which are Google servers installed in the networks of Internet service and network providers.” https://web.archive.org/web/20250722030821/https://spectrum....
This page isn't new, it's just marketing for a different purpose. This one is about "owned and operated" data centers, as this is basically a careers page. The cloud page is marketing for another purpose – cloud customers. Is there really any lying going on here?
not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly. Just increases attack vector and not very value adding to people. most customers care about latency and as long as you can point to a region where you are its enough
Surely anyone with an interest could find this through various means.
Also easily found potential military targets: power generation, water treatment, hospitals, schools, government buildings, etc.
Is it actually possible to hide the locations of datacenters? At least large ones?
Yes. They are not trivial to distinguish from other large industrial buildings. If you know a building is one, you still don't know whose.
It's local public knowledge. The buildings are registered with the county they're in and pay taxes. In the US at least, that's public info.
Odds of data centers being physically attacked at scale are low. Most of the population doesn't care enough, and the vocal minority is under a lot of scrutiny.
Except from the massive power hookup, all the cooling equipment, and the emergency generators, of course.
You can hide a handful of racks for some boring 2000s hosting. You can't hide a GW-scale AI behemoth.
Finding a datacenter from aerial or space photos isn't hard if you know how to identify a heat exchanger or huge generator. Both of which are very distinctive. Then limit that search set to certain sizes of big rectangular buildings. And ones with relatively low counts of passenger cars parked during mid day times.
Yeah - they should force mapping services to blur the data center - and just the data center - on their satellite imagery. That will make it impossible for people to find them.
> not really sure its a wise choice to disclose datacenters anymore publicly.
Transparency is good.
Think they're referring to the recent drone/datacenter velocity exchanges in Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.
Those countries are actively engaged in wars.
If the US ends up in a similar asymmetric warfare scenario, the location of corporate data centers being known is low on the priority list. Google is assuming a peacetime footing where public transparency and accountability matter.
> Those countries are actively engaged in wars
So is the US.
Kinda hard to hide them when you choose to build them in people’s backyards and ask them for a local tax break. The Meta ones near me are very visible.
There's also probably 100k people at Google who can see where all their data centers are, and it just takes one to tell someone else
Correct. The internal maps are quite thorough and detailed. At least they were.
Astonished they disclosed this. Even more astonished how few there are.
How many of these would have to get destroyed for them to go out of business?
Anyone motivated would always have been able to find these easily.
Before Microsoft made Bing, Google was more secretive about the scale needed to compete, with cloak and dagger code names and secret companies.
… but then when people took taxis to "Jet Stream LLC" or whatever, the driver just goes "oh you mean Google? lol".
The kind of threat who would be able to get past security would also be able to find the DCs.