Data Centers in PA (and Space), AI Cost Overruns and Cloud Outages

There is a LOT happening in the world of IT infrastructure, so let’s share some recent news items of interest to Eastern Pennsylvania technology professionals. 

Data Center Development in Pennsylvania: With organized pushback against some of the hyperscale data center developments planned in Pennsylvania, Governor Shapiro has proposed some guardrails.  Developers who commit to meeting guidelines on energy sourcing and usage, community engagement, environmental protection, and other public concerns will receive tax incentives and streamlined permitting.  You can review the proposed guidelines in the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development Standards.    

AI Cost Overruns: IT executives understand the difficulty in controlling cloud budgets due to frequent cost overruns, and some artificial intelligence users are struggling with similar issues.  One Claude customer reportedly ran up a bill of over $500 million in a single month.  Shortly after many encouraged employees to go full bore into AI we’re seeing organizations shift to encouraging more judicious usage of the tools.   

Cloud Outages: If you keep up with the world of infrastructure you’re certainly aware of the uptime challenges of the major public cloud providers.  Another AWS outage, this one on May 7th, proved once again that complexity is not necessarily a friend of availability.  A cooling issue was the cause of this latest downtime-triggering event, with Coinbase blaming AWS’s issues for a day-long outage and promising greater resiliency in their infrastructure to avoid allowing a cloud provider to be a single cause of failure for their crypto platform moving forward.  

Data Centers in Space: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a big proponent of orbital data centers, but recently suggested that Elon Musk’s projection that SpaceX was two or three years away from operating data centers in space was a bit aggressive.  Bezos’ Blue Origin enterprise definitely will be extending their timelines due to an unfortunate explosion during a static test fire last week.  The rocket is a total loss and the launchpad will be out of commission for a few months.   Bezos has certainly shown the ability to overcome challenges but the realities of extending empires into space are proving to be challenging. 

Data Center on Earth for the Pennsylvania Enterprise: If you’re part of an enterprise seeking cost-controlled, high-availability, secure, highly connected data center colocation in Eastern Pennsylvania, Direct LTx would welcome your evaluation.  Email us at strategy@DirectLTx.com for a discussion and/or to schedule a tour of our Earth-based data center.