> 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.
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.
As for putting up with what one considers stupidity... depends just as much as what you are offered to do so and whether it actually makes sense for Europe to offer that in this case :).
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!
That is exactly why big clouds never put all their eggs in one basket, even if it is a super cheap and cold basket. The cost of protecting and backing up network lines for an isolated island quickly eats up any benefits from geothermal energy. Physical security for terabit lines is way more expensive than air conditioning these days
Iceland has mostly been governed by the center right conservative independence party, which has been quick to sell land and resources to anyone interested. Kárahnjúkar is the canonical example of this, a huge hydro plant powering aluminium smelters owned by a foreign company.
Right now, different parties have the majority rule, and their interest in projects like these are not clear. I would suspect that a motivated investor could fairly easily get them built. The hurdles would be logistics and connectivity much more than red tape.
Iceland is culturally and politically scandinavian with some influence from the US. In august there will be a vote to start accession talks with the EU. This has been a heavily contested issue for years, largely due to Iceland's unique resources.
Iceland is an independent country, although I suppose it is involved with NATO. But I think you may be thinking of Greenland (which is a territory of Denmark).
"Iceland doesn’t have that much excess power generation. Already our power companies have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users.
Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we’d have to ruin the environment some way. We just don’t have that many locations left for hydroelectric or geothermal power plants. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites – destroying them would be bad for the economy – important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for. Even if we shut down some of the aluminium smelters, reusing that power elsewhere would be problematic. The Kárahnjúkar power plant is in the middle of nowhere and was purpose-built to serve the aluminium industry. When it generates excess power – which happens – that power is usually wasted because the grid can’t shift it from the region where most of the smelting takes place to the regions that have most of the population.
However, data centres in Iceland are both located near populated areas and are almost exclusively used for “AI” or crypto. You can’t buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in a building in Reykjavík somewhere, not in a data centre
And those data centres use more power than Icelandic households combined.
Instead of putting limits to “AI” and cryptocoin mining, the official plan is currently to destroy big parts of places like Þjórsárdalur valley, one of the most green and vibrant ecosystems in Iceland."
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.
A week and a half ago, I was at VivaTech in Paris, where I listened to dozens of European founders complain about the EU AI regulations - not because there was something they wanted to do that they were prohibited from doing, but because the way they are written, they have no idea what they can or can't do.
They're looking at how to put servers in Norway and Iceland specifically because they can figure out what the rules are, and in the EU, they cannot.
Iceland and Norway are part of the EEA so the AI Act and GDPR will reach them just like Germany or France. Running away there from regulators makes no sense. But running from bureaucracy to get land permits and substation connections - yeah maybe municipalities work faster there
SpaceX is a grift totally dependent on the USA untrustworthy government. The actual financials don’t add up revenue, profit and loss, similar to the AI model companies yes, the insiders will win, but no one else does.
Iceland and Norway win nothing, having giant data centers within their territories the only losers will be the common people of each country like having a strip mine on your land.
What is also interesting is that the tone death city slickers from other countries, particularly the United States, think they can waive money at Icelanders and Norwegians and have them jump to a tune of greed.
I've mentioned this in other threads, but a well managed data center policy from a functioning municipality can make data centers a boon rather than a nuisance. Loudoun County, Virginia (of MAE-East, AWS US-East-1, and Equinix fame) has navigated it in a way that has led to continually lowered property taxes combined with excellent well funded public services, and less downside than other industrial land uses would have. They also have noise and other regulations that mean that the data centers functionally just act like empty warehouses. They've kept up with grid capacity, so none of them rely on loud, polluting, off grid generators, and electricity and water are not noticeably more expensive than in other regions.
If Norway navigates this policy half as well as they've navigated their oil, this could be beneficial for the common people and help Europe detangle themselves from reliance on US or Chinese tech.
I happened to be looking around at some datacenters on Google Maps in Chantilly, VA and I noticed that their neighbors were: a busy international airport, a quarry, various contractors such as paving and air compressor rental, and a bunch of car dealerships. There is a residential neighborhood nearby, but it's separated from the datacenters by a 6-lane divided highway. That's nice, that makes sense, that's how it's supposed to be.
The problem with datacenters is pretty much entirely the same as the problem with other industries. It's why we have industrial zoning, and yes people who live too close to industrial zones of all kinds tend to suffer ill effects (noise, pollution, ugly).
We don't see towns rushing to plop steel mills right in people's back yards and cut them subsidized electricity deals at everyone else's expense. So why should they do it for data centers? It shouldn't even be a question, none of this data center madness should be happening.
Heck, there are plenty of decommissioned/underutilized industrial zones already. Why aren't we building datacenters on top of old tank farms along industrial waterways? Or along interstate highways which are punishingly unpleasant to live near already?
> 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.
Some quick research:
Denmark to Iceland is ~2300 km which has a theoretical one-way signal propagation of ~11.5ms.
Real-world round-trip time would be 25-35ms though.
So for certain AI workloads, network is probably not the bottleneck.
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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.
Despite being on a major fault line, Iceland is actually not all that shakey itself - particularly across the whole island.
2016 worldwide sample https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/Ma...
100 year 5+ of Iceland https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=62.319,-...
As for putting up with what one considers stupidity... depends just as much as what you are offered to do so and whether it actually makes sense for Europe to offer that in this case :).
Aluminum smelting is enough?
Neither Iceland nor Norway are EU member states.
Must be those pesky EU rules which prevent putting sovereign EU data centers in non-EU countries. /s
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...
If one can't countenance the US, then Australia would be off the table too because of their own US Cloud Act law, no?
https://www.ag.gov.au/international-relations/international-...
https://www.insideprivacy.com/cross-border-transfers/austral...
Europe is not a country.
This makes as much sense as asking why won't Asia building Data Centers in Mongolia.
If this was supposed to be EU, this also makes no sense. EU is not a country.
You van ask why individual member states won't build AI datacenters. You might have 27 different answers.
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!
That is exactly why big clouds never put all their eggs in one basket, even if it is a super cheap and cold basket. The cost of protecting and backing up network lines for an isolated island quickly eats up any benefits from geothermal energy. Physical security for terabit lines is way more expensive than air conditioning these days
Iceland has mostly been governed by the center right conservative independence party, which has been quick to sell land and resources to anyone interested. Kárahnjúkar is the canonical example of this, a huge hydro plant powering aluminium smelters owned by a foreign company.
Right now, different parties have the majority rule, and their interest in projects like these are not clear. I would suspect that a motivated investor could fairly easily get them built. The hurdles would be logistics and connectivity much more than red tape.
Iceland is culturally and politically scandinavian with some influence from the US. In august there will be a vote to start accession talks with the EU. This has been a heavily contested issue for years, largely due to Iceland's unique resources.
Iceland is an independent country, although I suppose it is involved with NATO. But I think you may be thinking of Greenland (which is a territory of Denmark).
This article is 100% AI generated slop
Thanks, I flagged it
Water cooling loop into a large public pool. If it works for the geothermal power station...
There’s a couple of bathhouses (named “bathhouse”) in NYC that heat their pools via crypto miners.
From "Your use of AI is directly harming the environment I live in" at https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/your-use-of-ai-harms-th... by the Icelandic citizen Baldur Bjarnason:
"Iceland doesn’t have that much excess power generation. Already our power companies have to occasionally limit power delivery to heavy users.
Increasing power generation that much requires tough choices: we’d have to ruin the environment some way. We just don’t have that many locations left for hydroelectric or geothermal power plants. Most locations that remain are popular tourist sites – destroying them would be bad for the economy – important ecosystems, or would require improvements to the grid that nobody seems to be willing to pay for. Even if we shut down some of the aluminium smelters, reusing that power elsewhere would be problematic. The Kárahnjúkar power plant is in the middle of nowhere and was purpose-built to serve the aluminium industry. When it generates excess power – which happens – that power is usually wasted because the grid can’t shift it from the region where most of the smelting takes place to the regions that have most of the population.
However, data centres in Iceland are both located near populated areas and are almost exclusively used for “AI” or crypto. You can’t buy regular hosting in these centres for love or money. If you buy hosting in Iceland, odds are that the rack is in a building in Reykjavík somewhere, not in a data centre
And those data centres use more power than Icelandic households combined.
Instead of putting limits to “AI” and cryptocoin mining, the official plan is currently to destroy big parts of places like Þjórsárdalur valley, one of the most green and vibrant ecosystems in Iceland."
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?
The Andrew Johnson administration considered offering to buy both Greenland and Iceland from Denmark!
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.
A week and a half ago, I was at VivaTech in Paris, where I listened to dozens of European founders complain about the EU AI regulations - not because there was something they wanted to do that they were prohibited from doing, but because the way they are written, they have no idea what they can or can't do.
They're looking at how to put servers in Norway and Iceland specifically because they can figure out what the rules are, and in the EU, they cannot.
EU digital regulations, including the AI Act, apply in EEA states, including Norway and Iceland.
Yeah, they said "outside of EU countries" and I assumed, maybe they meant somewhere else.
Iceland and Norway are part of the EEA so the AI Act and GDPR will reach them just like Germany or France. Running away there from regulators makes no sense. But running from bureaucracy to get land permits and substation connections - yeah maybe municipalities work faster there
The EU has suffered from decades of brain drain.
Every conversation about it very well demonstrates this fact.
If you build it you can profit from it by renting out capacity. This is what SpaceX is doing, for example. If you control the hardware...
SpaceX is a grift totally dependent on the USA untrustworthy government. The actual financials don’t add up revenue, profit and loss, similar to the AI model companies yes, the insiders will win, but no one else does.
Iceland and Norway win nothing, having giant data centers within their territories the only losers will be the common people of each country like having a strip mine on your land.
What is also interesting is that the tone death city slickers from other countries, particularly the United States, think they can waive money at Icelanders and Norwegians and have them jump to a tune of greed.
I've mentioned this in other threads, but a well managed data center policy from a functioning municipality can make data centers a boon rather than a nuisance. Loudoun County, Virginia (of MAE-East, AWS US-East-1, and Equinix fame) has navigated it in a way that has led to continually lowered property taxes combined with excellent well funded public services, and less downside than other industrial land uses would have. They also have noise and other regulations that mean that the data centers functionally just act like empty warehouses. They've kept up with grid capacity, so none of them rely on loud, polluting, off grid generators, and electricity and water are not noticeably more expensive than in other regions.
If Norway navigates this policy half as well as they've navigated their oil, this could be beneficial for the common people and help Europe detangle themselves from reliance on US or Chinese tech.
I happened to be looking around at some datacenters on Google Maps in Chantilly, VA and I noticed that their neighbors were: a busy international airport, a quarry, various contractors such as paving and air compressor rental, and a bunch of car dealerships. There is a residential neighborhood nearby, but it's separated from the datacenters by a 6-lane divided highway. That's nice, that makes sense, that's how it's supposed to be.
The problem with datacenters is pretty much entirely the same as the problem with other industries. It's why we have industrial zoning, and yes people who live too close to industrial zones of all kinds tend to suffer ill effects (noise, pollution, ugly).
We don't see towns rushing to plop steel mills right in people's back yards and cut them subsidized electricity deals at everyone else's expense. So why should they do it for data centers? It shouldn't even be a question, none of this data center madness should be happening.
Heck, there are plenty of decommissioned/underutilized industrial zones already. Why aren't we building datacenters on top of old tank farms along industrial waterways? Or along interstate highways which are punishingly unpleasant to live near already?
Can you?
Did SpaceX datacenters magically became profitable after the compute started to be rented out when you include depreciation and so on?
I would really like to see some evidence of this.
[dead]
Here comes the EU. Once again trying to regulate themselves out of the problems they caused by regulations.