There are no European companies that need them so why build datacenters for American companies to profit from? We don't need to be colonised by tech bros for effectively no gain.
They're looking at how to put servers in Norway and Iceland specifically because they can figure out what the rules are, and in the EU, they cannot.
Every conversation about it very well demonstrates this fact.
Iceland and Norway win nothing, having giant data centers within their territories the only losers will be the common people of each country like having a strip mine on your land.
What is also interesting is that the tone death city slickers from other countries, particularly the United States, think they can waive money at Icelanders and Norwegians and have them jump to a tune of greed.
If Norway navigates this policy half as well as they've navigated their oil, this could be beneficial for the common people and help Europe detangle themselves from reliance on US or Chinese tech.
The problem with datacenters is pretty much entirely the same as the problem with other industries. It's why we have industrial zoning, and yes people who live too close to industrial zones of all kinds tend to suffer ill effects (noise, pollution, ugly).
We don't see towns rushing to plop steel mills right in people's back yards and cut them subsidized electricity deals at everyone else's expense. So why should they do it for data centers? It shouldn't even be a question, none of this data center madness should be happening.
Heck, there are plenty of decommissioned/underutilized industrial zones already. Why aren't we building datacenters on top of old tank farms along industrial waterways? Or along interstate highways which are punishingly unpleasant to live near already?
Did SpaceX datacenters magically became profitable after the compute started to be rented out when you include depreciation and so on?
I would really like to see some evidence of this.