Today I heard some US official going on about how it's ideal for datacenters.
Presumably the B200s will be brought in via dogsled.
US has absolutely lost the plot
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!
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.
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.