Why? Not an expert on DC location or construction. What makes it any better or worse than somewhere else?

- land price

- water/electricity price

- local wages

- internet bandwidth

I'll agree with most of your points as to why it's not likely the most cost effective, but the point re: internet bandwidth is just absurd.

Area with expected earthquakes.

I know of at least five large data centers in the Sunnyvale / Santa Clara area.

Mind sharing names? My company shut down its Santa Clara DCs around two years ago for reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread

A quick Google search would easily answer this for you, but I'll oblige.

Equinix SV2, SV4, SV6 are all in Sunnyvale/Santa Clara, but Equinix also has 4 more very close by in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and/or San Jose.

CenturyLink has two DCs in Sunnyvale.

You can find a dozen more listed here:

http://www.datacentermap.com/usa/california/santa-clara/

And this doesn't include the many privately held by major internet brands in the Valley.

Thanks. Should've googled it myself. One of the first things I got to do when I joined my company(first job, just moving into the valley) was to tour our soon-to-be-dead DC. Was a really cool experience.

Look at the map GP posted. That residential block is sided by the Apple complex, a block of large industrial buildings, a Home Depot and an expressway.