Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?

EdwardDiego

> an island runs its servers on volcanoes and waterfalls Going out on a limb, the word "volcanoes" may be part of why, I know I was particularly perturbed when I found out my bank's failover data centre was about 20km away from their main one in a city built on an active monogenetic volcanic field. Also, not sure how important latency is, but Iceland is rather far from mainland Europe.

po1nt

Here comes the EU. Once again trying to regulate themselves out of the problems they caused by regulations.

expedition32

There are no European companies that need them so why build datacenters for American companies to profit from? We don't need to be colonised by tech bros for effectively no gain.

Danox

Number one the whole island is on one of the most active faults in the world, and two why would they want to participate in such stupidity. They have been getting along very well up until this point. Why would they want to expose themselves to a mass of people who don’t give a crap about them.

ButlerianJihad

Iceland's unique isolation seems to be both advantageous and disadvantageous. I don't know about their political history or stability, but it seems to me that their culture has been continuous and comparatively stable for a very long time. While their de jure status and allegiance may be intertwined with powers that govern them from afar, I would speculate that an island locale like Iceland enjoys a lot of de facto autonomy and they can do as they please, being so physically inaccessible. The distance and political concerns may also be a disadvantage to tenants in their data centers. I can imagine that the inhabitants of Iceland would be reluctant to sell out like this. At the very least, what's going on in the Strait of Hormuz reminds us all that data centers are strategic quasi-military targets, and must be defended and protected by sophisticated military shields, because disabling or destroying them would be decidedly advantageous in wartime. It's important to keep in mind that "data centers" are largely the aggregation and consolidation of "machine rooms" that used to take space in every corporate campus and every headquarters building (combined with network interchange points); there is a ton of commercial property that's sort of gutted now, as machine rooms migrated to the cloud: not only WFH/remote jobs are affecting the vacancies, but the machines and robots are moving in to live with "roommates" of their own kind nowadays!

a0-prw

Neither Iceland nor Norway are EU member states.

astrodust

Water cooling loop into a large public pool. If it works for the geothermal power station...

jacknews

The whole idea of a 'sovereign' data center is that it is under your control and jurisdiction, and you can protect it. Iceland is not an EU member, and is remote. What happens if Trump decides Iceland should be a US state?

gwern

NZ/AU are also interesting options for Europe, if they can't countenance the USA: https://alethios.substack.com/p/why-new-zealand-is-an-overlo...

levocardia

This article is 100% AI generated slop