> The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average.
If the people always talking about how cheap solar is want to fix this, find a way to make that cheapness actually make it into the customer's electric bill.
There are periodically news articles and such about data centers in Iceland, of course, but I get the impression it's mostly a fad, and the real build-outs are still in Northern Virginia as they've always been.
The typical answer I've seen is that Internet access and low latency matter more than cooling and power, but LLMs seem like they wouldn't care about that. I mean, you're literally interacting with them over text, and there's already plenty of latency - a few extra ms shouldn't matter?
I'd assume construction costs and costs of shipping in equipment also play a role, but Iceland and Canada aren't that far away.
As for power, that's what I was referring to with geothermal and hydro - Iceland and Quebec both have famously cheap electricity. The former would need a large increase in capacity, for sure, but Quebec already pumps out a lot of power (and regularly sells it to the Northeastern US).
Not saying it wouldn't be difficult, by any means, but it does seem like all the right incentives are there.