> So where do they ask to put a small data center? Right in the city's entertainment district! Makes less sense than putting it on farmland. Look Michigan needs the jobs, just a little common sense would go a long ways.
The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1].
I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2]
At the time, a standard LAMP stack setup wasn't prepared for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem. Quite often you had no DB connection pool and every request for dynamic data opened/closed a DB connection. Having a fixed number of connections available also quickly hit the limits unless it was a dynamically configured pool. Which also filled up eventually.
If you were lucky you could reduce load by caching the URLs taking up the most resources and generate a webpage copy in the filesystem, then add some URL rewrite logic to Apache to skip going through your application logic and bypass the DB.
Then you discovered there is a limit of open file descriptors in Linux. After updating this and also shutting down all log files you ran out of things to change pretty quick and started pricing a beefier server. For next time.
The site of the old GM Fisher Body plant is a sixty acres brownfield. The proposed downtown data center location is a one acre unused parking lot. It is close enough to LBWL, Lansing's utility company for water/electricity, to reuse the generated heat [1].
I don't think this really compares to the 270 acres data center for OpenAi/Oracle planned in Saline Township, which will be connected to one of the few 345kV transmission lines in Michigan. [2]
[1] https://www.lbwl.com/community/newsroom/2025-11-05-deep-gree...
[2] https://openinframap.org/#11.64/42.1244/-83.8008