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Comment by DaedalusII | Hacker News Reader

good question, but there is a rational answer. remember if youre going to tie up a few billion in a project you want strong laws around ownership

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

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> africa is africa

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.

you have never worked in africa. its cheaper to build a data centre in low earth orbit than most of africa

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

What do you think of Moroccos efforts to build lots of DCs?

bad grid, bad fibre, #146 in the world in electricity production per capita. less power output than many US states, rule of law risk, civil unrest risk, and data sovereignty (gdpr), must get expat engineers (and get them visas)

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

> india is too politically risky. people will just steal your shit

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.

cant fund infrastructure because that is when the bad governance results in money and asset being stolen

rule of law why country like singapore and finland end up being richer than brazil or argentina

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