The US datacenter construction boom may be faltering and the reasons are not difficult to predict. The same supply shortages, price hikes and a lack of labor that have characterized not-quite-post-pandemic life is a risk for DC builders, too.

Construction consultancy firm Turton Bond's Darren Flood authored the report making that argument. Flood said that the need for datacenters is stronger than ever, but that  "COVID-19 variants, changing restrictions, constrained supply chains and strong demand create an unpredictable market."

All of this is hitting after the datacenter real estate market exploded into its own boom times, with unprecedented investments in suitable building sites.

Before that market instability, datacenter growth was through the roof, CNBC reported last year. One report said the datacenter market was worth $206 billion in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 10.2 percent. Datacenter land was also the highest performing real estate investment trust category in 2020, and absorption (i.e., datacenter occupancy) rates in the US increased 44.3 percent YoY in 2021, which was on top of a more than 70 percent increase in 2021.

One of the most present reminders of an unpredictable market is inflation, which the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts at 8.3 percent for April, the most recent month for which data is available. Flood expects inflation rates to continue to rise, but said they should bottom out at around 4 percent by late 2022. 

Inflation is hammering materials costs. Flood cites data from the BLS that found a 25 percent overall increase in material costs in 2021, and he doesn't think that will ease until "Q3 onwards."

Concrete, gypsum, HVAC equipment, EIFS systems, lighting controls, and switchgear and controls all increased in price through the end of 2021 with the biggest increase in the price of steel, which was up 12 percent in the last quarter, according to Flood's findings. 

In addition to overall inflation, the report says many of the materials used to build datacenters is delayed by months due to ongoing supply chain issues. Those waiting on copper wire are looking 15 to 17 weeks, steel won't come for 31 to 33 weeks, aluminum will take 36 to 38 and electrical equipment will take nearly a year. 

Labor shortages are also expected to continue. Flood cites a lack of skilled workers, high rates of retirement in the construction industry, vaccine mandates and "national progression of the workforce." The report makes no mention of employees quitting over pay.

Further complicating this labor shortage is that many datacenters are built in the middle of nowhere, offering few laborers even in the best of times. Getting around that will require the right incentives to get workers to temporarily relocate, Flood said. 

Those issues haven't constrained some of tech's biggest names, though: Amazon announced plans recently to build new datacenters in Santa Clara, California, and last month said it plans to build five more in rural Oregon to the tune of $12 billion. Attempts to construct similar data enters on the east coast have been met with resistance from locals.

Flood said that near-term successful projects will be those focusing on buying materials and equipment now, even though it may not be needed for months. "Early procurements, off-site warehouse storage of key equipment & locking in prices before quarterly increases is the current recipe for successful procurement in a datacenter development.". ®

Updated Amazon has blasted a proposed antitrust law that aims to clamp down on anti-competitive practices by Big Tech.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) led by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and House Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) is a bipartisan bill, with Democrat and Republican support in the Senate and House. It is still making its way through Congress.

The bill [PDF] prohibits certain "online platforms" from unfairly promoting their own products and services in a way that prevents or hampers third-party businesses in competing. Said platforms with 50 million-plus active monthly users in the US or 100,000-plus US business users, and either $550 billion-plus in annual sales or market cap or a billion-plus worldwide users, that act as a "critical trading partner" for suppliers would be affected. 

Alibaba Cloud offered a peek at its latest homegrown silicon at its annual summit this week, which it calls Cloud Infrastructure Processing Units (CIPU).

The data processing units (DPUs), which we're told have already been deployed in a “handful” of the Chinese giant’s datacenters, offload virtualization functions associated with storage, networking, and security from the host CPU cores onto dedicated hardware.

“The rapid increase in data volume and scale, together with higher demand for lower latency, call for the creation of new tech infrastructure,” Alibaba Cloud Intelligence President Jeff Zhang said in a release.

Updated The US House Oversight Committee has told Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to turn over documents pertaining to the collapse of an Amazon warehouse – and if he doesn't, the lawmakers say they will be forced to "consider alternative measures."

Penned by Oversight Committee members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO) and committee chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), the letter refers to the destruction of an Edwardsville, Illinois, Amazon fulfillment center in which six people were killed when a tornado hit. It was reported that the facility received two weather warnings about 20 minutes before the tornado struck at 8.27pm on December 10; most staff had headed to a shelter, some to an area where there were no windows but was hard hit by the storm.

In late March, the Oversight Committee sent a letter to Jassy with a mid-April deadline to hand over a variety of documents, including disaster policies and procedures, communication between managers, employees and contractors, and internal discussion of the tornado and its aftermath.

Concern is growing that a World Trade Organization (WTO) moratorium on cross-border tariffs covering data may not be extended, which would hit e-commerce if countries decide to introduce such tariffs.

Representatives of the WTO's 164 members are meeting in Geneva as part of a multi-day ministerial conference. June 15 was to be the final day but the trade organization today confirmed it is being extended until June 16, to facilitate outcomes on the main issues under discussion.

The current moratorium covering e-commerce tariffs was introduced in 1998, and so far the WTO has extended it at such meetings, which typically take place every two years.

AWS is trying to help organizations migrate their mainframe-based workloads to the cloud and potentially transform them into modern cloud-native services.

The Mainframe Modernization initiative was unveiled at the cloud giant's Re:Invent conference at the end of last year, where CEO Adam Selipsky claimed that "customers are trying to get off their mainframes as fast as they can."

Whether this is based in reality or not, AWS concedes that such a migration will inevitably involve the customer going through a lengthy and complex process that requires multiple steps to discover, assess, test, and operate the new workload environments.

Amazon's attempt to dismiss a lawsuit, brought by one of its senior software engineers, asking it to reimburse workers for internet and electricity costs racked up while working from home in the pandemic, has been rejected by a California judge.

David George Williams sued his employer for refusing to foot his monthly home office expenses, claiming Amazon is violating California's labor laws. The state's Labor Code section 2802 states: "An employer shall indemnify his or her employee for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer."

Williams reckons Amazon should not only be paying for its techies' home internet and electricity, but also for any other expenses related to their ad-hoc home office space during the pandemic. Williams sued the cloud giant on behalf of himself and over 4,000 workers employed in California across 12 locations, arguing these costs will range from $50 to $100 per month during the time they were told to stay away from corporate campuses as the coronavirus spread.

Amazon.com has decided to end its Kindle digital book business in China.

A statement posted to the Kindle China WeChat account states that Amazon has already stopped sending new Kindle devices to resellers and will cease operations of the Kindle China e-bookstore on June 30, 2023. The Kindle app will last another year, allowing users to download previously purchased e-books. But after June 30, 2024, Kindle devices in China won’t be able to access content.

An accompanying FAQ doesn’t offer a reason for the decision, but an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters “We periodically evaluate our offerings and make adjustments, wherever we operate.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's first shareholder meeting was a rousing success for Amazon leadership and Jassy's bank account. But for activist investors intent on making Amazon more open and transparent, it was nothing short of a disaster.

While actual voting results haven't been released yet, Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky told Reuters that stock owners voted down fifteen shareholder resolutions addressing topics including workplace safety, labor organizing, sustainability, and pay fairness. Amazon's board recommended voting no on all of the proposals.

Jassy and the board scored additional victories in the form of shareholder approval for board appointments, executive compensation and a 20-for-1 stock split. Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021. 

Comment What goes up must come down - even in the tech industry. 

In a period of a little more than a month, the biggest tech companies have dropped trillions of  dollars in valuation, setting off alarm bells across the industry. Recovering from this downturn will be different, though: Businesses will have to walk a fine line between meeting metrics and respecting a new work culture that has emerged since the pandemic.

Investors are telling companies in their portfolios to cut staff, reduce budgets, raise prices, and prepare for a long, slow recovery – and even the most cash-flush tech giants are reevaluating their employee spends, from salaries to stocks to perks. 

Smart homes are increasingly becoming hackable homes, according to consumer research.

The report by consumer rights organization Which? paints a grim picture for people who have equipped their residences with gadgets, many from trusted tech names.

As with pretty much everything in IT, if you connect a device to the internet, ensuring it's patched and has a decent password is the very least owners can do. Even then, there are no guarantees that this is secure.

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