A Data Centres Hub Puts Everyone at Risk, Especially People Who Live Near Them at Times of War/s
Spoiler: Datacentres are military targets, they attract missiles, some with nuclear warheads
We have mentioned this before, but we'll mention it again because the media ducks this important aspect regarding data centres. It's an 'inconvenient' aspect to owners and sponsors of this media.
A standard or "conventional" missile's "payload" is enough to paralyse but not entirely eliminate (or 'vapourise' or 'glass') a datacentre. When it's done, it'll most likely take a datacentre offline for impending partial or full recovery, but that's about it. We saw this about half a dozen times this past spring and summer. Iran successfully hit datacentres in several nations. They can recover, eventually, but had Iran enjoyed the 'privilege' of nukes, even moderately small nuclear warheads, entire sites (as in DCs and supporting infrastructure) would be wiped with a huge casualty tally/toll, including in surrounding areas (not counting the cancer that comes with fallout, which is extremely difficult to evade completely).
This morning I tried to get a clearer picture of how many data centres we have in Greater Manchester. Many are based in the Trafford area, as one might expect (centre of operations of this "industrial" kind, set aside football and cricket ground).
A friend then reminded me that 1) "98+% of data center activity is military in nature", thus 2) articles 58.b and 52.2 of the Geneva Convention become relevant, as noted also at [1, 2].
In essence, or in terms everybody can understand (non-techies), living close to many datacentres has the same effect as living close to a large military base or many military bases. It increases risk to oneself, it does not reduce the risk. During war, countries first target places that are 1) strategic; 2) "legitimate" (legal) and 3) cause most harm to the 'enemy'. █