I recently encountered this photo link to Googles Global data infrastructure locations.
Which made me remember not so long ago when I witnessed a Google Datacenter being constructed. I used to ride my bike everyday on the path that follows the river and 2 sides of the complex grounds.
One day I brought my camera for something else and it struck me I should get some shots of this to compare later when it was complete. I’ve worked construction in the past and my grandfather was a well known local contractor for over 50 years in this small community so it was easy to gain access to the complex to take a few shots.
They picked this location because of its proximity to The Dalles Dam which generates massive amounts of electricity, over 90% of which is sold directly to California. Some of the latter shots are of the substation they built exclusively to power their datacenter. The substation is hooked directly to the dam. To give you an idea of the scale of the buildings, each cooling unit on top of the structures is as big as a family car. That’s a total of 64 family car sized cooling units for the tubing that pumps cold water through their datacenters.
This datacenter project was massive by any scale but especially for such a small community.
These images were taken by me in 2005 during the construction of the Google Datacenter in The Dalles, Oregon where I lived.
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