Why Greenland's natural resources are nearly impossible to mine
theweek.com
theweek.com
Presumably the B200s will be brought in via dogsled.
US has absolutely lost the plot
All the fuss and constant bombardment of tweets is to distract from the Epstein files. And it works very well!
It's interesting that at some point datacenters in space also become viable, which sounds absurd, but since the need for FLOPS and power is immediate, space and Greenland have to be far down the list of places to choose to build. Right now you build where the lead time for power capacity of some sort is shortest.
And you don't have to own a country to put datacenters there. Simply investing there will bring jobs and money for the inhabitants, will make profit for the investor, it's a win win.
Forcibly taking it over will make a lot of enemies and disruption to trade. It will make less profit overall, especially once the population starts destroying your company assets, connection lines etc. Not to mention all the second tier effects in global lost trust from trading partners.
But Trump just looks at that big map and goes "This will be MINE". Is it really about more than that?
I think some interviewer with Trump did actually ask him the question you posed and he said something to the effect of "ownership is important" for him _personally_ not necessarily for the _US_ which is the a ridiculous thing to hear from a leader of a country.
It is increasingly becoming so. And some designs work well. I only read a post about the internet archive's smart use of the server heat a couple days ago, I can't find it back now. And indeed, good point. Alaska would be great for that too.
And the US is kinda an exception, the rest of the world is watching emissions but the US is trying to screw the world up for everyone else. Including themselves but Trump followers seem to view all the disasters as an 'act of god'. I remember those poor school kids in the flooding in texas last year and there being more 'thoughts and prayers' than actual help or prevention.
I know Ireland is popular for datacenters in part because of the climate there (in another big part all the tax breaks but ok).
And yes you can cool them with renewable energy. Most datacenters are. But it also means that renewable energy can't be used for something else.
[0]: https://eandt.theiet.org/2022/12/12/iceland-coolest-location...
Does he actually know the difference between "mine" and "the US'" though? I was under the assumption that since the US is his, anything important for him is also important for the US, and vice versa.
The cooling would be a bonus, but you also can't ignore all the negatives. No power, limited roads, no deep harbour, no skilled support staff, no fiber, no backup fiber, latency, geopolitical uncertainty, thawing permafrost etc
I'd bet the biggest compute in the country is on the US base already...
But of course you're right, really it's mostly about map-painting.
I'm not sure that you would. You might think that cooler ambient temperatures mean less cooling required, but it's really a matter of rapid heat transfer away from chips, which is why electronics in satellites need active cooling, despite the temperature of space being near absolute zero.
There's no way that by itself would make enough of a difference to justify building a dc there, given all the other negatives that others have mentioned.
It's certainly a far cry from opening some windows and stringing a few fans together in the hope that the chilly outside air will be enough to keep things cool!
The Mercator projection (which is how most 2D maps are displayed) makes Greenland appear to be the size of North America. It's large, to be sure (around 25% bigger than Alaska), but it's certainly not continent sized.
Obviously thats no justification for his actions, but found the explanation at least a bit amusing given his other odd misunderstandings (eg thinking people seeking asylum are from an insane asylum, thinking wind mills somehow affect whales, etc. The list goes on and on...)
What a worthless pile of bits you've dumped on the world.
It's about breaking up NATO for Putin.
> President Donald Trump has renewed his efforts to take over Greenland, and tapping into the Danish territory’s natural resources is a key part of the strategy.
It is not "taking over" or "annexing". It is invading. A military ally, at that.
And it is not "tapping into [...] natural resources". It is plundering their natural resources.
None of these hypotheticals are consensual. There is no plan for a freely agreed-upon bilateral agreement. This is about invading and pillaging a foreign land. Whether it is Greenland, Canada, or any other country.
Threatening to invade (which the Trump administration has been explicitly doing) is about as damaging as invading in the long run, either way we have sent the message loud and clear that the US is no longer a reliable ally and everyone has to shift away from the post-WW2 world order.
The problem is that virtually the entire new world and much of the old world was acquired by force and threats of force that has been legitimized over time. So yes, I think this is clearly extortion and any sale that takes would be coerced.
But ever was it thus.
There are a lot of people and they talk about lots of different things.
Iran is all lined up.
There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.
Are we including the way arms are poured into various countries, for dubious reasons? Or are we excluding Israel, Saudi and Turkey?
The word on the street is that it's yet another step to try to keep the Epstein files out of the news.
More consequentially it’s an attempt to destroy NATO so Putin can have his way with Europe.
Also see Venezuela. Oil seems to have been a key part of the aim. However oil companies seem surprised and not entirely keen.
If a sane administration is elected in 2028, support for oil majors in Venezuela disappears.
the US shares its current control with russia for these new trade routes, but it wants to be able to unilaterally decide what china can do at sea. thus it needs control that isnt shared with russia or europe.
its the same thing with panama, the US needs to recapture control to ensure that china cannot ship through without US permission
I do not get your point. An annexation is a military invasion with the intention of an ongoing control over that area.
"Taking over" is an euphemism of some more powerful entity stealing from some less powerful.
What's your point here?
If we exit the Antarctic treaty, then so will everyone else and there’s multiple competing claims.
Reliance on the US in any way is a liability.