"Superloops" And Bullet Trains -- Welcome To The 21st Century .... And Back To The Future For Jerry -- January 20, 2015

I am re-posting this. This is quite amazing. Think about this. A 90-year-old governor wants to feel the thrill of a 19th century railroad baron -- he must be reading Ayn Rand -- and pushes forward with a $100-billion trans-continental state railroad that no one seems to want and no one can afford.

Meanwhile 25-year-old entrepreneurs see the need for a "super-loop" of fiberoptic cables, switches, routers, uninterruptible power supply, batteries, solar energy, to transmit data between downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, West LA (UCLA), South LA (USC), the San Fernando Valley (another unnamed industry that uses a lot of bandwidth), the Silicon Valley, San Marino, and San Francisco.

So where would be the best place to build this multi-billion-dollar-state-of-the-art data switching center? Maybe Fresno. Or Paso Robles. Or San Jose. Or maybe Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. But no, the data centers are in Nevada (Las Vegas and Reno).

Yup, while Jerry Brown looks to the past to build a railroad, the young entrepreneurs are building "superloops" to transmit data for the above-named locations for these customers (and many others): eBay, Xerox, Zappos, Amazon, DreamWorks, Shutterfly and the U.S. government.

The San Jose Mercury (California) News is reporting:

RENO, Nev. -- The largest lithium battery factory in the world is getting a new neighbor at an industrial park east of Reno -- the world's biggest data center.

Las Vegas-based Switch plans to invest $1 billion in the 3 million square foot "supernap" center. It will be built on 1,000 acres at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, where Tesla Motors currently is building its $5 billion gigafactory to make batteries to power its electric cars.

Gov. Brian Sandoval announced the plan in his State of the State address Thursday night along with a $1 billion expansion of Switch data space in Las Vegas.

"This will make Nevada the most digitally connected state in the nation,"says CEO. The company operates two data center facilities in Las Vegas, providing security, power and cooling for stacks of thousands of servers owned by more than 1,000 clients that include eBay, Xerox, Zappos, Amazon, DreamWorks, Shutterfly and the U.S. government.

Switch's "supernap" project includes the development of a 500-mile fiber optic network it calls a "superloop" that will connect Reno, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco and dramatically increase the speed of information traveling between the cities.

California could have been the most digitally connected state in the union. Instead it will have a railroad that begins in Fresno.