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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

Do the gray wires mean anything special? There are a lot going to the north pole.

Also I see no one has bothered hooking up Antarctica. (I always thought that would be a good place for a data center in light of free cooling.)

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It's very impractical to put anything in Antarctica. The continent is very far from any place where substantial numbers of people live. The northern hemisphere has much more habitation in the arctic and sub-arctic areas. Moreover, the northern hemisphere in general is wealthier and more populous than southern, so it makes sense to put data centers to the North.

Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost part of South America, lies at 55°S. There's nobody living further to the south than that. Very few people live even at 50°S.

55°N lies Copenhagen, Newcastle upon Tyne, Moscow, Kazan and Chelyabinsk. Cities like Glasgow, Oslo, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Kaliningrad, Helsinki, Tallinn and St. Petersburg are further to the north. Population gets more sparse north of 60°N (I think about 20-25 million people live north of that, a quarter of them Finns) but even when you are looking for cool surroundings, it makes sense to put data centers in places where you have people and infrastructure like stable energy and connectivity.

Ars Technica did a good article on this very thing. While the cooling is nice in some aspects, down there it's a bit too much, as components become brittle and easily damaged at temperatures that low. Static electricity is a larger concern with air that dry. (moisture is frozen out, and Antarctica is literally a desert.) Not the place to simply set your PC outside and go for the overclocking record.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tech...

That as well. You don't think of it that way, but the place is arid.

Are you referring to the Gray Cable with all the landing points in Northern Canada?

Firstly, this is not the North Pole. There is no land at the North Pole, which is why it doesn't appear on the map. What you're looking at is infact the Ivaluk Network, designed to connect up remote Arctic communities (and I'm sure some Oil and Gas interests).

The other cable system going to the Arctic Circle is the Svalbard network connecting mainland Norway with this remote island. Why? Well it's the location of a ground station for Low Earth Orbit satellites (including imaging/spy satellites).

I was wondering the same thing, I found this article: http://www.arcticyearbook.com/index.php/briefing-notes2014/1...

I skimmed through it, looks like that it's an upcoming cable network to diminish the latency on Asia-Europe connections. Unfeasible before global warming and melting icecaps.

How exactly would it be powered?

How about tidal power?

Or actually aren't there giant icebergs that break off and float away each year? Maybe there's way to have that pull a cable wrapped around around a very geared up generator. .. not sure how to explain this idea ...

Supplying any hardware to Antarctica is hugely expensive and makes no sense whatsoever, except for the purpose of exploring Antarctica itself. Maintaining a submarine cable there would also be extremely expensive. And you just don't need to go to such extreme conditions to cool down a data center; it's cool enough in Northern Europe. And you can even utilize the heat (here, we use it to warm up houses).

... if it were attached to a cable, it wouldn't float away.

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