A new kind of farm is popping up. Tucked away on small plots on America’s back roads, it cultivates no soil or seed.
Rather, it nurtures curiosities about everything from porn to pinochle expressed in a nearly endless sequence of 1s and 0s queried from desktops, laptops and iPhones around the globe.
The computer server farm — huge banks of computer servers doing the heavy-lifting logic of Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon — is bringing bits of Silicon Valley to places like Pryor, Okla., and Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Moving inland means quicker connections by getting closer to customers. Spreading hubs across the continent makes networks more dependable. And tax breaks await. But server farms also guzzle electricity, the way computer technicians gulp Red Bull. The farms are massive, up to football-field-size, buildings filled with racks of servers.
So finding places where the light bill is, well, lighter goes a long way toward pleasing stockholders. “If you can make the machines use power 5 percent more efficiently, that could save tens of millions of dollars,” said Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University.
Consider Google’s decision to plop down server farms on the outskirts of Pryor and Council Bluffs — the latest expansions from its original hub in California. Both sites come with tax abatements that will save millions. And by sitting 1,000 miles from another new server farm that the company has planted on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon, the search engine lowers the chances that a West Coast brownout will dash your ability to Google your blind date.
Similarly, diversifying locations makes Google’s network more stable, as sabotage or natural disaster in a single location will have less impact.
Google acknowledges building five server farms — all in cheap-electricity locales — in the United States and dozens around…