According to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta trust and safety workers will be relocated to Texas to prevent them from “censoring” users. Experts point to other advantages.
I think that California should take keeping itself competitive as a tech center more-seriously. I think that a lot of what has made California competitive for tech is because it had tech from earlier, and that at a certain threshold, it becomes advantageous to do more companies in an area – you have a pool of employees and investors and such. But what matters is having a sufficiently-large pool, and if you let that advantage erode sufficiently, your edge also goes away.
We were just talking about high California electricity prices, for example. A number of datacenters have shifted out of California because the cost of electricity is a significant input. Now, okay – you don’t have to be right on top of your datacenters to be doing tech work. You can run a Silicon Valley-based company that has its hardware in Washington state, but it’s one more factor that makes it less appealing to be located in California.
The electricity price issue came up a lot back when people were talking about Bitcoin mining more, since there weren’t a whole lot of inputs and it’s otherwise pretty location-agnostic.
In California and Connecticut, electricity costs 18 to 19 cents per kilowatt hour, more than double that in Texas, Wyoming, Washington, and Kentucky, according to the Global Energy Institute.
(Prices are higher now everywhere, as this was before the COVID-19-era inflation, but the fact that California is still expensive electricity-wise remains.)
I think that there is a certain chunk of California that is kind of under the impression that the tech industry in California is a magic cash cow that is always going to be there, no matter what California does, and I think that that’s kind of a cavalier approach to take.
I think that California should take keeping itself competitive as a tech center more-seriously. I think that a lot of what has made California competitive for tech is because it had tech from earlier, and that at a certain threshold, it becomes advantageous to do more companies in an area – you have a pool of employees and investors and such. But what matters is having a sufficiently-large pool, and if you let that advantage erode sufficiently, your edge also goes away.
We were just talking about high California electricity prices, for example. A number of datacenters have shifted out of California because the cost of electricity is a significant input. Now, okay – you don’t have to be right on top of your datacenters to be doing tech work. You can run a Silicon Valley-based company that has its hardware in Washington state, but it’s one more factor that makes it less appealing to be located in California.
The electricity price issue came up a lot back when people were talking about Bitcoin mining more, since there weren’t a whole lot of inputs and it’s otherwise pretty location-agnostic.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/30/this-map-shows-the-best-us-states-to-mine-for-bitcoin.html
(Prices are higher now everywhere, as this was before the COVID-19-era inflation, but the fact that California is still expensive electricity-wise remains.)
I think that there is a certain chunk of California that is kind of under the impression that the tech industry in California is a magic cash cow that is always going to be there, no matter what California does, and I think that that’s kind of a cavalier approach to take.