A new crop amongst the Cold Storage

My husband (Class XXV) and I attended the grand opening of Yahoo's newest date centre in Quincy, which gave us a chance to rub shoulders with some of the folks we met while he was putting together the first datacentre here in Wenatchee. I got a chance to thank co-founder David Filo for fixing my Yahoo e-mail account last year, as well as tip Congressman Doc Hastings that my class would be seeing him in Washington DC early in 2008.

I had a nice conversation with his assistant, whose husband went through the program, and thanked Rufus (Class XXIV) again for speaking to our class last month.

Now Datacentres seem an odd crop for north central Washington, but high-tech is planting itself firmly into the local economy, drawn by low-cost power, cheap land (in Grant County at least) and an unusual non-profit called NOANet, which brokers bandwidth from the inland PUD fibre optics networks.

The challenges to this new industry are related to my speech topic last month: water. Datacentres take an enormous amount of energy to cool, owing to the heat of thousands and thousands of servers. My good friend, Pete, who helped me immeasurably with background for my water rights talk, did a fair amount of work with the city of Quincy and Yahoo to secure water rights before the plant was opened.

It will be very interesting to see how the water used to cool this and other mega-datacentres can be re-used to benefit the ag industry as well.