Free Republic

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid. In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent...

The Fed is becoming quite crafty when it comes to digital currency. They’re aware that it’s not popular, mainly because Americans are wary about handing control of their finances over to a government that could cut them off with a flick of a switch. So, in typical globalist fashion, they plan to “coax” you into using it by introducing the infrastructure as an option they know you’ll love. That’s precisely what they’re doing as we speak with this new FedNow program. This payment system, recently rolled out by the Federal Reserve, sets the foundation for the US government to essentially...

The Central Bank of Nigeria announced it will begin, effective in January, restricting cash withdrawals from banks and ATMs to just $45 per day as part of a push to move the country toward a cashless economy. If this were a one-off, I wouldn’t bother writing about it. But it comes on the heels of mega-banks announcing similarly creepy new policies in recent months in China, India, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, the U.S. and many other nations, all pointing to an imminent switch over to a global digital money system. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve put out an announcement in...

The debate over bitcoin's environmental footprint has shaken its price, and prompted a public discussion about the environmental footprints of various industries, from oil & gas to tech to Wall Street. In a gauge of the public's interest in the environmental footprint of various industries vs. crypto, one chart that sought to offer some context for the bitcoin network's energy usage went viral.Still, as Bloomberg concedes, all those emails, memes, videos, PDFs and photos need to be stored somewhere. And with most companies increasingly reliant on cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure, these companies are building data centers like...

* Google plans to open new offices in Houston and Portland, CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday. * Google unveiled plans to spend $7 billion on offices and data centers across 19 states. * Pichai said the expansions would create at least 10,000 new full-time jobs in the US this year. Google plans to ramp up its real estate by investing more than $7 billion in offices and data centers across 19 states, despite the growing momentum for companies to let employees work from home permanently The tech giant's investment plans, announced Thursday, include spending more than $1 billion in the...

* Data centres range from vast warehouses in Iowa to a converted paper mill in Finland * Buildings are so large Google even provides bicycles for engineers to get around them * Street View tour of North Carolina facility reveals Stormtrooper standing guard Google has given a rare glimpse inside the vast data centres around the globe that power its services. They reveal an intricate maze of computers that process Internet search requests, show YouTube video clips and distribute email for millions of people. With hundreds of thousands of servers, colourful cables and even bicycles so engineers can get around...

Decision - Matter of: Technosource Information Systems, LLC; TrueTandem, LLC Finally, our Office also held a hearing in this protest. During the hearing, we again requested that GSA explain the basis for its data center location requirements. In response, GSA repeated that the solicitation had originally limited data center locations to the continental United States, but that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the USTR [United States Trade Representative]considered the limitation restrictive of trade, and advised GSA to permit data centers located in foreign countries. Transcript at 13-14. During the hearing, the contracting officer testified that GSA expressed...

To save money, the U.S. government will shut down hundreds of data centers across the country and consolidate their services into its remaining data centers. The White House Office of Management and Budget recently announced that it would be shutting down 373 U.S. government data centers by 2012. Over the last two years, the number of U.S. data centers has quadrupled, and yet they are running at only about 27 percent utilization, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The maintenance costs of these data centers, including backup power supplies, air conditioning, fire-suppression and special security devices, has been...