Hetzner put a data center in the desert and I'm jealous of the cooling

I don't have their number. My phoenix rig runs 3.5 gph per 100 tons at 800 TDS incoming. Scale inhibitor helps maybe 20 percent. Hetzner's on reclaimed water I'd guess, lower TDS than my municipal.

The real trick is nighttime flushing. We purge the sump at 2 AM when evap load drops. Cuts scale accumulation by half. Pad life goes from two seasons to four.

Still not three to five years though. Someone's marketing team rounded up.

Same. I asked Hetzner sales last quarter about Hillsboro cooling specs for a colo quote. They sent the PUE whitepaper and clammed up on blowdown rates. "Commercially sensitive."

Hillsboro's on the Columbia River basin though. Water's basically free there. Nevada's a different game. Colorado River allocations, drought contingency plans. That water bill might surprise people.

This is why my 2019 Nevada quote died on the vine. Site was great, power cheap, then the water rights lawyer got involved. $0.047/kWh power, sure, but the water assurance bond was six figures annually. My CFO walked.

Tampa's $0.089 looks worse until you price in unrestricted municipal water. We bleed blowdown into the storm drain, no reclamation permit, no lawyer.

Desert math is harder than it looks on the brochure.

Following this thread closely. My CDN nodes are all in HCMC, ambient 32C, humidity 75%. No evaporative possible, wet bulb too high.

I looked at Singapore for expansion. Hetzner has a presence there but their pricing starts at EUR 4 for cloud, colo not even listed publicly. For my game traffic I need bare metal under $100/month or the model breaks. I used https://www.hetzner.com/sb for a while but even auction prices crept up.

Desert US would be perfect for cache nodes except latency to Vietnam is 180ms. Oceania closer but cooling worse.

Nobody solves all three: cheap power, dry air, close to users. You pick two.