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ButlerianJihadtoday at 2:41 AM2 repliesview on HN

Iceland'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!


Replies

Hugsuntoday at 3:27 AM

Iceland has mostly been governed by the center right conservative independence party, which has been quick to sell land and resources to anyone interested. Kárahnjúkar is the canonical example of this, a huge hydro plant powering aluminium smelters owned by a foreign company.

Right now, different parties have the majority rule, and their interest in projects like these are not clear. I would suspect that a motivated investor could fairly easily get them built. The hurdles would be logistics and connectivity much more than red tape.

Iceland is culturally and politically scandinavian with some influence from the US. In august there will be a vote to start accession talks with the EU. This has been a heavily contested issue for years, largely due to Iceland's unique resources.

volkl48today at 3:21 AM

Iceland is an independent country, although I suppose it is involved with NATO. But I think you may be thinking of Greenland (which is a territory of Denmark).