Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#2> 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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#3Here comes the EU. Once again trying to regulate themselves out of the problems they caused by regulations.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#4There 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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#5Number 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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#6There 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.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#7There 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...
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#8Iceland'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!
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#9Neither Iceland nor Norway are EU member states.
Re: Why Won't Europe Build AI Data Centers in Iceland?
#10There 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…
The EU has suffered from decades of brain drain.
Every conversation about it very well demonstrates this fact.