Facebook to plonk $1.5bn data centre in Iowa - report

Re: Microsoft already has...

It isn't fucking cold there as much of the year as you may think (or you may live a part of the world where anything below 60F/15C is "fucking cold") If outside temperature was a primary concern, they'd stuck it up in northern Minnesota which also is also centrally located, has plenty of water and inexpensive utility. Being near a body of water large enough (or moving fast enough) so you can dump all your heat into it without negatively affecting it is much better for cooling than relying on outside air to be cool enough for part of the year.

The big draw for Iowa (Google already has a datacenter in Sioux City) is one of the most highly educated populations in the country, with low to moderate cost of living, and a ton of wind energy capacity in western Iowa that allows them to buy renewable energy. These days no one will be caught dead building a huge datacenter using fossil fuel sources. So they locate them near hydro facilities, where wind power is plentiful, or build out their own renewable generation like Apple did in NC.

Supposedly this datacenter will have solar panels and NG fuel cells like Apple's NC datacenter so the early speculation was that this was another Apple datacenter, but these recent leaks appear to peg it as Facebook's.