The Meta data centre dilemma
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is at stake when a big company like Meta comes knocking on your door? The small Dutch town of Zeewolde is grappling with this. Meta - the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - wants to build a huge data centre in the area which could be the biggest in Europe. It is a proposal which has raised questions about land-use, water consumption, political power and energy.
The municipality says it will bring significant benefits – but not everyone agrees. Opponents like local resident Sipke Veentra, say the centre will use five times the amount of energy that their local windmills provide. And local farmer Carla Dekker is concerned that prime agricultural land is being given over to development and is worried about the amount of water Meta will use. They both claim Meta is being given preferential treatment over local businesses. But those in favour, like Egge Jan de Jonge the local cabinet member who is steering the deal through, says Meta will have to provide new power supplies to feed the centre and that they have a proven record of having done this in the past.
Stijn Grove, from the Dutch Data Centre Association says there is no Dutch national strategy and that more political leadership is needed from the top. And Sebastian Moss, who watches the data centre industry for the website DatacenterDynamics says companies face similar challenges to Meta when trying to site hyper-scale data centres all over the world.
(Picture: Data centre; Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Matthew Kenyon, visiting the small Dutch town of Zawalda, which is grappling with one of the biggest decisions it's had to make in its short history, whether to say yes or no to meta. |
| 0:15.3 | If we look to the future, then we see, okay, we need some jobs that are in the new economy. So we thought that this data center from Facebook will be a very good place to be in Zewald and in the region, Flavlon. |
| 0:28.5 | It's fair to say that not everyone is convinced. |
| 0:31.7 | It brings no money. It brings no jobs. |
| 0:34.8 | And it brings no heat. |
| 0:36.2 | What's at stake when a big company like Meta, that's Facebook to most people, comes knocking |
| 0:41.3 | on your door. |
| 0:42.5 | That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:48.7 | That's the hum of thousands of servers processing our online data, |
| 0:57.6 | not just our shopping or our browsing, |
| 1:00.0 | but our documents and photos in the cloud, our streaming services and downloads, |
| 1:04.6 | and the huge demands that global businesses and governments make on the internet, |
| 1:09.7 | which is, in some some senses a physical place after |
| 1:12.2 | all. All that online activity needs a lot of infrastructure. And the most visible part of it is the |
| 1:19.7 | data center. The data center is a facility to host IT equipment in a secure and efficient way. |
| 1:29.7 | Many online services are very important and we rely on them very much. |
| 1:36.4 | And you want them in a very secure and trustworthy place, which is online 24-7. |
| 1:43.7 | Stein Grover speaks for the industry body, the Dutch Data Center Association. |
| 1:48.9 | The ever- accelerating demand for online services across the world |
| 1:52.3 | means that his is a growing business with quite specific requirements. |
| 1:56.5 | A data center needs power. It needs good personnel, it needs a stable connection to the grid, |
| 2:06.3 | and it needs not the hottest climate, because you want to cool all this IT equipment next to |
... |
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