2nd guess is Project Alluvion is Microsoft, not Amazon

When someone asked who was behind Project Alluvion I guessed Amazon, but knew it was a guest when I posted.

Project Alluvion is??? Amazon or someone else?

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26, 2014 AT 7:56PM

I was talking to a data center friend and he tipped who was behind Alluvion, so I corrected myself to my friends who asked, but I couldn’t post based on a conversation that is not a public disclosure

I have friends asking me if I know who is behind Project Alluvion.  My guess to throw out there is Amazon.

DesMoines Register posts on the public document discovery that Microsoft’s GFS employees are registered for Project Alluvion.  My data center friends tip was right.  My guess was wrong.  Oh well, it was a guess.

Microsoft appears to be the company behind “Project Alluvion,” the newest data center project proposed for Iowa, according to documents provided to The Des Moines Register.

In the documents, acquired by the Register through a public records request, West Des Moines city and water works officials discuss Project Alluvion and the project’s water needs with Brian Andersen and Ray Cheng, two employees of GFS Data Center Engineering, a division of Microsoft that works on the company’s cloud storage and data center services.

Both Andersen and Cheng show Microsoft as their current place of employment on their profiles for a social network site.

Part of public disclosures are driven by the need to improve the water infrastructure to support the cooling needs of the data center.

The proposed new data center project, at full build out, could use up to 2.4 million or 6 million gallons of water in a single day when temperatures reach 90 or higher, according to differing figures from West Des Moines and Des Moines waterworks officials.

The projected usage demands significant infrastructure expansion — potentially a new water tower or underground aquifer and storage tank for reserve water — at West Des Moines or Des Moines waterworks facilities.

When you build really big data centers it is hard to hide.  Google, Facebook, and Apple know this as well as Microsoft.