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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

In the past few decades, data centers have been placed with latency in mind - ie. Typically you don't want to be more than 1000 miles from users.

However, in the world of AI, latency is already 1 second plus, so the economics change - you do better to build where there is cheap electricity and free cooling.

I forsee Iceland as a good place to invest.

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Iceland is a small country, so it'll depend on what power infrastructure is already there, too much power consumption will overload the grid - unless they build new power plants and other infra.

Historically they had so much "cheap" energy that they built aluminium smelting plants.

Power is why you would build in Iceland. There is a lot of geothermic potential there. It's after all, the land of hot springs and volcanoes. So if you need more power, build a new geothermic power plant.

Almost all countries have taxes and regulations on electricity (grid maintenance isn't free!), however at AI datacenter scale it makes sense to build the power plant on the same site as the datacenter, therefore avoiding those electricity taxes.

So wherever you build, you'll most likely be building the same wattage of power station as you do datacenter.

Lots of other resources can be shared too - for example shared cooling systems

That's why places like Norway, Iceland, and even parts of Canada are starting to look like prime real estate

Bits of Russia too, if you can smuggle the requests and responses in and out.

Remember Russia has huge quantities of free gas which used to be sold to the EU but is right now wasted.

>Remember Russia has huge quantities of free gas which used to be sold to the EU but is right now wasted

It isn't "WASTED", what re you on about.

Russia has no east-west gas pipeline. That means gas extracted in the west of Russia, which was previously sold to Europe, is now in excess and has nowhere to go. Currently it is flared off.

News article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62652133

That was August 2022. What are the odds it's the same after 3 years?

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