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In yesterday’s essay, we looked at Keir Starmer’s quasi-religious attempt to conjure into existence a UK-based “AI” (i.e., machine learning) industry. Obviously, no such industry is going to locate to an England which lacks the electricity, water, basic infrastructure and skilled workforce needed. But there is another “land” not so far away (no, not Scotland or Ireland) which is already a “European” datacentre leader. That would be Iceland. As Tryggvi Adalbjornsson reported in MIT Technology Review in 2019:
“The southwestern tip of Iceland is a barren volcanic peninsula called Reykjanesskagi. It’s home to the twin towns of Keflavik and Njardvik, around 19,000 people, and the country’s main airport.
“On the edge of the settlement is a complex of metal-clad buildings belonging to the IT company Advania, each structure roughly the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool. Less than three years ago there were three of them. By April 2018, there were eight. Today there are 10, and the foundations have been laid for an 11th…
“Each one of those Advania buildings in Reykjanesskagi is a large data center, home to thousands of computers. They are constantly crunching away, processing instructions, transmitting data, and mining Bitcoin. Data centers like these generate large amounts of heat and need round-the-clock cooling, which would usually require considerable energy. In Iceland, however, data centers don’t need to constantly run high-powered cooling systems for heat moderation: instead, they can just let in the brisk subarctic air. Natural cooling like this lowers ongoing costs.”
It is not just the cold though. Iceland sits atop the volcanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge, making it one of the few places on Earth that can generate cheap and easy geothermal electricity. Unlike Starmer’s UK, with its ultra-expensive wind power, Iceland produces electricity almost too cheap to meter. Also, crucially, geothermal counts as “green” within European Union definitions, allowing corporations locating to Iceland to avoid too much scrutiny of the impacts of the processes to which that “clean” energy is put to use… mostly bitcoin mining and corporate supercomputing.
Nor is the “free” cooling – essential to running high-temperature AI datacentres – really free. Sure, locating to the Arctic avoids the need to build industrial cooling plants next to the datacentres. Instead, hot air is merely exchanged for the ambient cold air outside. There is another way of framing that, however… warming the outside air – something which, at the proposed scale for AI risks greatly accelerating the loss of Arctic ice from global warming.
Not, of course, that a relatively few datacentres in Iceland is going to have much impact. But then, Iceland isn’t the only land to offer “free” cooling. A decade ago, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was promoting Facebook’s Swedish Arctic datacentre:
“Keeping the internet cool isn’t easy, and the energy consumption of data centers always been a headache for tech companies. Different firms have tried to solve this problem in different way, with Google using its AI expertise to trim costs, while Microsoft has even been exploring the possibility of underwater data centers. For Facebook, though, the solution was simpler: move to a cold country.”
Sweden might not have Iceland’s cheap geothermal electricity, but it has the next best thing… hydroelectric power. Common with many Arctic lands, Sweden has an abundance of water, allowing it to provide “green” energy to corporations which are anything but. Neighbouring Norway offers the same sales pitch – cheap electricity and cold air. But these pale into insignificance compared to the almost virgin datacentre real estate 752 miles to the west of Iceland.
In the deranged imaginations of those who call themselves “the left,” the existential threat from Donald Trump becoming president of the USA (because so many seem to believe that he is “literally Hitler”) is either that he will allow the production of so much oil that we will fry the planet, or that he will start World War Three with Russia and/or China. In practice though, Trump’s chest-beating over China and Russia seems more like a negotiating ploy designed to result in better trading arrangements for the USA. Nor is America in a position to produce too much more oil. The conventional fields went into decline in 1970, while the shale deposits which generated the brief oil glut in the 2010s are depleting fast. Meanwhile, deep sea deposits in the Gulf of Mexico and to the north of Alaska are too expensive to provide the base for an economic revival – there may be a handful of shale deposits beneath currently restricted Federal land, but at best, these could only provide a few years of cheap oil and gas.
Ah, you might say, but Trump wants to get hold of Greenland because he thinks there is oil there. That may be so, although up to now, oil prospecting in the Arctic has come up empty. Note, however, that despite recent pearl-clutching about oil company donations to the Republican Party ($59 million compared to the $8 million for the Democrat Party – whose rhetoric is anti-oil anyway) the “Tech Bros” lined up behind Trump, providing his campaign with some $394 million. And following his election, Big Tech has donated a further £200 million toward his inauguration, his political operation and to a future presidential library – making it the largest such fund on record.
Now, I trust, my readers will grasp what Trump’s seemingly irrational rant about Greenland was all about. Not fantasy oil drilling. Even less a base for nuclear missiles. But simply the largest western source of cold air. And one reason for the Greenland independence movement is the vast potential income to be made by turning the coastline over to AI datacentres. Back in 2012, Henrik Leerberg at Schneider Electric pondered:
“As a Dane, I can only admire the way that Iceland has gone about turning its climate and geothermal resources into commercial gold from the data center industry. It got me wondering whether the business of green data centers could take a more central role in any government’s plans for economic development. What difference could data centers make, for example, to another former province of Denmark – Greenland?
“Greenland is the world’s largest island. Most of the country is covered by ice, in places up to 4km thick. Most of the country’s 56,000 inhabitants are clustered in small communities along its 44,087 km coastline. The climate is Arctic, and overall the average temperature even in the warmest months does not exceed 10 degrees C. [But] According to a report, ‘Greenland urgently needs to develop new growth industries to consolidate future income’.
“Which is where the data center industry could step in: unlike Iceland, Greenland does not benefit from fibre connectivity. However, given the fact that the US has highlighted the strategic importance of Greenland to its security (together with its increasing importance to Northern trade routes) this presumably is not insurmountable. Like Iceland, Greenland has a climate which is dependably cold, an ideal free cooling environment. It has space, plenty of space. Pull up Greenland on Google Maps and you’ll be surprised how much space it has!
“What’s more, Greenland has a strong suit in renewables; calculations have shown that the country has a theoretical hydro power potential which could be sufficient to supply 70% of Europe with electricity. The small population means that power could be largely uncontested for investors.”
More recently, online chatter about turning Greenland into the world’s AI capital has been growing. For example, in a recent LinkedIn post, Ana-Maria Pruteanu from Powerstorm Holdings sets out Greenland’s potential, as does Mervyn Chamney from Eurotime:
- Natural Cooling
- Renewable Energy Sources
- Remote and Secure Location
- Strategic Location
To which we should add all of that ice… which would provide a vast supply of fresh (i.e., not corrosive) water to as many datacentres as you care to imagine – aiding the exchange of heat with the naturally occurring (for now) cold air outside.
At present, Greenland has just the one, Nuuk datacentre complex, and is limited due to a lack of undersea cabling. And given that the melting of the Greenland icecap is the one northern hemisphere event that would produce catastrophic sea level rise (sea ice melt doesn’t raise sea level) global and national political leaders have been opposed to any further development… until now.
While some within Trump’s circle may want to develop air and naval bases in Greenland, it is unlikely that the USA can afford the infrastructure and logistics to do so on a large scale. Don’t be surprised, however, if, in the course of the next four years, we are treated to US-backed Greenland “independence” followed by vast relocation of existing Big Tech datacentres along with widespread deployment of new 5GW AI datacentres across Greenland at who knows what impact on sea levels… but hey, at least we can say that the Greenland icecap was melted with “green” energy.
As you made it to the end…
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