> I'll never understand why tech companies choose some of the locations
That's because you've chosen not to read about it. Location is one of the most important things they think about for data centers and there are plenty of articles on the subject.
“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers for Meta. “We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”
To answer the question you're implying, surrounding temperature is pretty minor, the cooling required is orders of magnitude higher, so power access is more important; You'll frequently find them located near sources of energy.
moffkalast
Meta has defacto infinite money, they don't have to look for places where operation is cheap, but where they can be above the law as much as possible for doing whatever they want.
That's because you've chosen not to read about it. Location is one of the most important things they think about for data centers and there are plenty of articles on the subject.
Here's a recent article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/25/meta-massive-data-center-lou...
“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers for Meta. “We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”
To answer the question you're implying, surrounding temperature is pretty minor, the cooling required is orders of magnitude higher, so power access is more important; You'll frequently find them located near sources of energy.