Welcome to Mostly Cloudy! Today: why Meta thinks it will need different data centers than Facebook did, some actual good signs for tech spending in 2023, and the Linux Foundation does an end run around Google.
A Meta data center in Nebraska. Credit: Meta
Learning machines
The big internet companies of our time (AWS, Microsoft, Google, Meta/Facebook) have gotten really good at building massive data center complexes over the last 20 years. As seen above, almost all of them follow a similar pattern: heavily guarded collections of enormous, low-slung buildings in low-cost rural areas packed with servers, storage, networking connections, not to mention the incredibly sophisticated cooling equipment required to keep the operation from melting down.
But this week DCD uncovered a very interesting part of Mark Zuckerberg’s bet-the-server-farm pivot away from Facebook to the whole metaverse thing. Meta recently canceled a data-center expansion project in Denmark and is reportedly tweaking plans for 11 other expansion projects because the company believes “supporting AI workloads at scale requires a different type of data center than those built to support our regular online services,” according to a company spokesperson.
It’s not clear exactly what Meta has in mind for those new data center designs, but it’s worth noting that the Boomer Disinformation Machine has an underappreciated track record for forward-looking data-center design and development over the last decade or so. It has also shared those advances with the broader community through the Open Compute Project, allowing others to take advantage of its improvements in efficient cooling technology, for example.
AI somehow manages to be, at the same time, one of the most promising and overhyped technologies in this industry every year. Every enterprise tech vendor with a pulse is trying to sell high-margin AI products and services to the business world, and while there’s definitely some demand for those services, it’s also clear that a lot of buyers still aren’t convinced.
If Meta is right, and AI actually does need new thinking around data-center construction to thrive at scale, the company will be in an interesting position a few years down the road. It’s hard to envision the Big Three cloud providers moving as quickly to redesign entire data centers around AI processing, given the vast majority of their business will remain focused on the old-fashioned compute and storage services that everyone operating on the internet needs.
But nobody actually knows what the metaverse will actually be. Facebook and Instagram are far past their prime as internet novelties. Meta is going to need to do something to recoup this massive investment in AI data centers should Zuckerberg’s big pivot amount to little.
It’s time to restart the clock on that years-long enterprise tech media barroom debate (we’re a lot of fun): when will Meta/Facebook take advantage of its massive data center operation and start offering cloud computing services to the enterprise?
Beats selling hair-loss ads.
Back up the truck
Given the slump in the stock market, uncertain consumer confidence levels making their customers worry, and widespread layoffs, you’d think enterprise tech is gearing up for a rough year. But that might not be the case, according to CNBC’s Technology Executive Council, a group of CIOs and CTOs (now that sounds familiar).
Only 4% of that group said they planned to cut tech spending over the next year, with almost three-quarters saying they planned to increase spending in 2023. Granted, that’s an increase from earlier this year when nobody said they planned to decrease spending, but that’s still a very small number.
So much of the modern enterprise tech economy was still very new when the Great Recession hit in 2008, and people have had entire careers in this industry without experiencing the effects of a global economic downturn on their business. And while year-end predictions are for fools (ask me how I know), it’s starting to look like they’ll skate through this one as well.
One factor cited by CNBC’s panel was the belief that companies that pulled back on tech spending in the years after the Great Recession came to regret that decision after they fell far behind companies that didn’t. FOMO wins again.
Around the enterprise
The Linux Foundation gave birth to yet another foundation: The Overture Maps Foundation — founded by AWS, Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and, very pointedly, not Google — will work to provide businesses with a way to incorporate ”open” mapping data in their applications without paying the Google Maps tax.
Spotify plans to try and make money off its open-source Backstage project, which gives developers a dashboard showing them a number of different application performance metrics.
Google will have to disclose how much water it is using at its data center in The Dalles, Oregon, which is also where you have to decide if you want to float your wagon down the Columbia River or trek over the mountain to Oregon City in the classic video game.
There’s another billion-dollar military cloud contract up for grabs: The Army wants somebody to build an “easy button" migration system for on-premises workloads to cloud servers, which, good luck.
Tweet that made me laugh or cry or think
Thanks for reading — see you next week!