'Biggest Data Center' To Be Built in Arctic (bbc.com)

A small town in the remote north of the Arctic Circle is set to be home to the world's largest data center. From a report: The firm behind the project, Kolos, says the chilled air and abundant hydropower available locally would help it keep its energy costs down. The area, however, suffers the country's highest rate of sick leave from work, which may be related to its past as a mining community. The US-Norwegian company says it has already raised "several million dollars" for the project from Norwegian private investors. However, it is still working with a US investment bank to secure the remaining necessary funds.

Comments

Re:What about

[Ashtead]

Fiber is already there, along the railway line from Narvik and eastwards. There is no permafrost in this area, most of it is sea and bedrock, within which the mines were located. As for distance, even a large town such as Tromsø is further north and further away from the rest of Europe.

Re:What about

[networkBoy]

A huge amount of the data processing going on is not very latency sensitive once the stream starts, even if jitter sensitive (e.g. Netflix movie). If they court the market for "nearline" compute at a cost that is highly competitive to the national colo server farms (colo in this case meaning DC resident in-country) then I could see them doing quite well.

As others have noted, Fiber is there, as is foundation.

My concern would be actual physical access to personnel, particularly vendor support, though the latter could be mitigated by the vendor simply storing spares on-site, but not accessible to the DC until activated, at which time the failing unit would be taken off-line and shipped slow-boat back to the vendor.

There is already some level of precedent for this where Intel allows the largest consumers to pick the sku of the CPU *after* it's already on the motherboard, but while still on the assembly line. Fuse blows and sku is locked in. They then pay Intel the price based on the counts. This lets the likes of Dell react much faster to demand.