Datacenters in Iceland

March 24th, 2008 Alex

The latest BusinessWeek magazine had an article that talked about the cost of powering and cooling datacenters. Several companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft have been discussing having data centers in Iceland. According to the article, “the cost of power consumption by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2006, to $4.5 billion, and could double again by 2011, according to the U.S. government.” Having a data center in Iceland could cut a lot of the cooling costs down by pulling in the cool air from outside to cool the servers. It makes a lot more sense to have a data center in a cold place and the idea of using outside air and air from ice has been used for existing data centers in other places.  I assume there are a lot of other factors that are preventing a growth of datacenters from popping up in places where it is really cold, such as getting the power, internet cable fibres, and the resources. With the growing costs of power, I am sure that the huge amount of vacant land, cheap geothermal energy, and cold temperatures will draw some interests. Verne Holdings announced plans for a $306 million data center near Keflavik International Airport. It will be the first data center in Iceland set to open in 2009. Hopefully we will see more companies build out their data centers in cold areas to take advantage of the natural cold air.

Entry Filed under: Tech Industry