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Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#32> 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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Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#33There 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…
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
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#34Iceland'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 a…
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
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#35Europe 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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#36There 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.
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...
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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
Yeah, see my other comment, I made an assumption there because they said datacenters outside the EU, they didn't explicitly say Norway and Iceland, I assumed! Now I wonder what countries they meant!