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That’s an impressive quantity of electricity. Five gigawatts is almost enough to power the Las Vegas metropolitan area – with all its hotels, casinos, restaurants, and convention centers – on the hottest day of the year. So the annual operation of the world’s petascale search machines constitutes a Vegas-sized power sump. In the next year or so, it could add a dog-day Atlantic City. Air-conditioning will be the prime cost and conundrum of the petascale era. As energy analysts Peter Huber and Mark Mills projected in 1999, the planetary machine is on track to be consuming half of all the world’s output of electricity by the end of this decade.
Google’s Hölzle noticed the high electric bills after taking his post in 1999. At 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, power dominated his calculus of costs. “A power company could give away PCs and make a substantial profit selling power,” he says. (At The Dalles, the huge protuberances on top are not giant disk drives, climbing to the rooftop for a smoke while the RAM below does the work, but an array of eight hulking cooling towers.)
The struggle to find an adequate supply of electricity explains the curious emptiness that afflicts some 30 percent of Ask.com’s square footage. Why is the second-fastest-growing search engine one-third empty? “We ran out of power before we ran out of space,” says search operations manager James Snow, a ponytailed refugee from an IBM acquisition. Not only does the Verizon facility lack a cheap power source, it struggles to get any further power at all; designed for the more modest needs of Internet switching, the building has already maxed out the local grid. Consequently, Ask.com’s Sampson has followed Google’s trail to the Columbia River, where he’s scoping out properties. Perhaps by moving farther up the river into the Washington headwaters he can get even cheaper power than Google will get in The Dalles.
Microsoft and Yahoo are a few steps ahead of him, building me-too data centers in Quincy and Wenatchee, Washington, respectively. There they can take advantage of rock-bottom electricity prices as well as dark fiber laid by the Bonneville Power Administration. Patterning itself on Ronald Reagan’s cold war strategy against the Soviet Union, Microsoft is headed toward spending two dollars on data centers and online services for every dollar spent by Google. As Microsoft Live operations chief Debra Chrapaty tells me, her company “added a Google” last year in search capability.