Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (opens in new tab)

What is the actual procedure through which this happens? You buy the land and then are granted permission on a discretionary basis? It seems to me that if you were a small business this becomes much harder to participate in because you need to acquire and hold the unproductive asset.

This would mean that land use tends towards that which large firms (which can sustain the costs easily by self-financing) find useful.

Well my IP (regular plain residential Asian ISP) is blocked on this site. Zealous Cloudflare-blocking is breaking the web.

(also thanks for the useful message telling me to "contact the website owner... while blocking me from the website where the contact info should be)

My first reaction is that 244 acres for a data center sounds absolutely obscene. But I have to admit that I'm coming from a place of ignorance.

How big "should" a data center be? How big are some other data centers? How big is us-east-1, for an example of a large one? I'm finding this to be rather difficult information to google.

For a moment I thought they were referring to the Scottish Highlands...

Wealthy white exclave succeeds in using environmental justice language to keep cheap coal-fired power to themselves. Very American outcome.

Although I obviously don't care about Microsoft's outcome here, this was clearly a great site at the intersection of two transmission lines and with essentially infinite water resources.