Labor and land is expensive, energy is scarce and expensive, and colocation is not that valuable because latency is dominated by compute instead of transmission.
But there must be a good reason I am missing.
singapore ran out of land. malaysia ran out of water and electricity
indonesia is unstable politically and just started confiscating foreign owned farms
india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit
middle east - israel/iran chabad trump war etc. all within ballistic missile range, unstable
africa is africa
latin america no infrastructure (highways, power grid, etc)
labor is other bottleneck. it actually borderline impossible to bring in skilled engineers and technical specialist to remote energy rich areas
India is a huge place and some parts of it are vastly better managed than others.
> latin america no infrastructure (highways, power grid, etc)
The governance problem is quite real in Latin America actually, but I think it may have potential. If some infrastructure gets funded in the process it would have beneficial side effects all around.
rule of law why country like singapore and finland end up being richer than brazil or argentina
Jeez what a way to dismiss the second largest continent and the second most populous landmass in the world.
I'd argue Africa is the best place to start such a thing. Cheap labour, plenty of renewable energy. The biggest issue it probably has is how little bandwidth it has, and might require additional sea cables.
But "africa is africa" is not a way reason to dismiss the continent.
1 physical security is a problem, and in some countries like equatorial guinea or south africa foreigners arent allowed to own assets outright
2 cheap labour cant actually do anything. they are nice people but they cant read instruction manuals. cant set up data centres
3 no infrastructure. why zambia and kenya etc are 99% cellphones, is because there is no grid and no landlines because people steal all the copper wires
https://iol.co.za/the-star/news/2026-02-18-r23-billion-lost-...
stories engineers have told me about building things in africa: - i was working on an oil rig and one day the local employees started playing hide and seek and trying to kill us until a ransom was paid. for 48 hours we hid in a ventilation area until the ransom was organised, then had to go straight back to work with the people who were trying to murder us with power tools the day before for a month - the person who gave my company a contract was chainsawed to death on a beach
large scale offshore wind in norway could generate 50-75% of the entire US production with 80% uptime and then DCs built in norway or EU area
I mean, there's a reason Luleå is a popular datacenter spot: access to hydro & wind- but also "free cooling"; datacenters create a lot of heat and having a cold environment makes it easier to maintain ambient temperatures that are sustainable with lower energy consumption.
Additionally, people tend to prefer their servers are in geopolitically stable countries that are less likely to be bombed or undergo civil war (and the US likes to ensure civil war in countries that have a lot of oil) - and you want your datacenters to avoid any environmental hazards like earthquakes.
I can't imagine preferring the equator for datacenters.
the bottleneck is they keep running out of water for cooling
They were among the worst (and most expensive) datacenters I've worked with, but they were used because we were latency sensitive (game servers).
Haven't heard of anyone deploying to Indo/Malay though, maybe I missed something here.
More cynically, someone in the UK might want to do something that makes money with these data centers once the AI thing goes bust.