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

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 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.

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?

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 Andrew Johnson administration considered offering to buy both Greenland and Iceland from Denmark!