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LiquidMotion t1_itu7mv7 wrote

Won't someone think of the poor billionaires!

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AMajorPaine t1_itumolw wrote

Microsoft's increased costs running their datacentres will be passed onto consumers of their services.

A larger percentage of businesses use Microsoft Azure.

A lot of reddit uses Xbox services.

It's bad news all round

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LiquidMotion t1_itw5dhc wrote

I mean congress could just fix that but why would either of the two right wing parties give a fuck?

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AMajorPaine t1_itw6dh6 wrote

It's a global energy crisis. Not a US one. And if they did split the company up economies of scale would dictate prices would increase not decrease.

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TRichard3814 t1_itw5gyp wrote

Fix what, global energy markets?

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LiquidMotion t1_itw5r9j wrote

Monopolies and artificial inflation. That is supposed to be their job after all.

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TRichard3814 t1_itw7f8y wrote

Monopolies yes, inflation can only be fixed by QT and competition not Congress decree

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Gayrub t1_itugxne wrote

Who can just buy some solar panels.

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ThestralDragon t1_itvfkvm wrote

I'm pretty sure they're not releasing the news so you can feel sorry for them.

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goldfaux t1_itucgr6 wrote

Imagine what its costing consumers. We have to pay higher energy prices and price hikes from companies such as yours. The only difference is that companies will recover the costs from consumers.

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anTHaRic t1_ituidyi wrote

All it means is they’ll increase prices and charge their customers $1.6 billion more.

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tempreffunnynumber t1_itu8a47 wrote

? Didn’t the nuclear deal go through? What else was the point of the anti-radiation sickness meds?

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fleshie t1_itubo2e wrote

Checks Google, 1.87trillion, poor Microsoft.

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lightknight7777 t1_ituhll2 wrote

Sounds like enough money to also permanently solve the problem too...

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Willinton06 t1_itvy7dh wrote

800 million is not enough to solve climate change permanently, not even close

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lightknight7777 t1_itw17kn wrote

Who said anything about climate change? I'm talking about their energy shortfall. That's plenty to workshop a solution and begin implementing it in a profitable and effective manner.

Solving a problem isn't resolving the problem. It's figuring out how to resolve the problem.

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FallenJoe t1_itwkt5n wrote

Enormous amounts of time and money go into making datacenters more energy efficient, both in the design of computing equipment and in the physical design of heat control within them. If there was a solution that could fix energy issues for a measly 800 million , it would have been done years ago.

Unfortunately, due to the need to have datacenters around the world to service various regions (over 200 geographically separate datacenters just for Azure), there is no easy solution that's just going to resolve the issue.

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lightknight7777 t1_itwldm4 wrote

I'm not talking about making the centers more efficient, I'm talking about getting into producing energy. Prices don't really go up or down if you're the producer. It's always just cost.

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FallenJoe t1_itwm7jz wrote

....Prices are up for Microsoft primarily because in Europe the input cost of gas and coal fired power stations is going up due to major increases in the cost of fuel, and the increased cost of generating power is getting passed on to the consumers. This is not something that changes just because you own the power station.

Real life isn't Simcity, you don't buy a power plant for 500k, slap it down, and get 200,000MW at a fixed cost indefinitely.

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lightknight7777 t1_itwmj1i wrote

It absolutely does if you use solar, wind, geothermal or anything not so dependent on an oligarichal supply chain. If they make a coal or gas plant then they're idiots.

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FallenJoe t1_itwnjcc wrote

"Lets heavily invest in power sources that don't provide consistent power, so that we can power our datacenters that requires 100% power uptime with absolutely no downtime" is a bit of a ridiculous take.

They're not idiots, which unsurprisingly means that they're just continuing to buy power from existing power suppliers instead of dumping what would a decade of work and tens of billions of dollars of construction into getting a slightly better power rate in Europe.

There is no magic handwaving solution to energy prices that's going to take effect quickly, because if there were, people would already be doing them. There's no reason for Microsoft to get into the power business when any economically feasible plan can be done by another party. The slightly better power rate isn't worth the massive cost, financial risk, and regulatory exposure across multiple countries that would be required.

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lightknight7777 t1_itwnlxu wrote

Batteries exist.

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FallenJoe t1_itwo5xc wrote

And there are many reasons why they are not used on a large scale.

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lightknight7777 t1_itwohkn wrote

looks at Australia

Disagree. There are several very large battery systems implemented now. The reason why there aren't a ton is because solar has only really been viable for a decade.

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FallenJoe t1_itwtwps wrote

There's a very large difference between using batteries as an intermediate point and temporary storage point for input into the grid, and using them as a primary power source for datacenters, which are one of the most energy intensive operations around. The longer you need to store power, the less economically viable battery use is. Even if you had enough perfectly consistent (hah!) solar/wind generation nearby to power your facility, the battery levels required to keep the facility powered would be prohibitive.

I am a network engineer who works in both larger datacenters and smaller network closets/hubs, and even the battery backup required to keep a single crowded vertical network rack running for a few hours in the event of a power outage is hundreds of pounds and waist high. Scaling that out to large datacenter levels of power consumption and overnight capacity and you're talking completely absurd levels of expensive power storage capability.

And again, if there's a good location for a cheap and green new power installation, it's not really to Microsoft's benefit to get into the power business. It's 100% going to be cheaper for Microsoft to let someone else build and run a power plant that feeds into the general grid and just take advantage of the lower aggregate power cost.

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lightknight7777 t1_itx38br wrote

Those backups are just for emergency outages. Actual grid batteries are far more efficient.

Power companies routinely take advantage of customers. You're acting like they don't make money when they operate.

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Willinton06 t1_itw1i3d wrote

I actually meant to write “the energy crisis” but my mind was in another post I guess, my bad, but I guess Microsoft could solve it’s own energy issues for 800 million, not the entire energy crisis but maybe the piece that affects them

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Merkin-Jerky t1_itvhabt wrote

They can afford it. It's not like the fuckers pay their fair share of taxes.

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Competitive-Cow-4177 t1_itv5b42 wrote

Than they didn’t prepare good enough, it’s their own responsibility.

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hammeredtrout1 t1_itvqqoz wrote

Ignoring the post - but MSFT’s recent earnings are wild. Azure makes up >50% of their total revenue - MSFT is a cloud computing company now, with everything else (teams, windows, office, Xbox) are side bets.

I wonder if their insistence on grouping windows with Xbox is actually obfuscating how well theyre doing with gaming (laptop demand is struggling massively worldwide)

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inthenight098 t1_itw4aub wrote

You’re right. Especially since “Everything else” is also running on their cloud, consuming cloud services, so not really side bets.

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double-xor t1_itvqtv8 wrote

Yeah, but the strength of the US dollar …

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in2q21 t1_itvrvlg wrote

Shall we open a GoFundMe?

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JonathanJK t1_ituafy1 wrote

So go spend $799million to help fix it.

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No_Match1529 t1_itudyop wrote

thats what you get you pieces of SHITE

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