Reykjavik, Iceland--The president of Iceland greeted data center business leaders at a conference here on Tuesday, the same day Alphabet stock dropped 6% on earnings news of a slowdown for Google Cloud.
The irony between Alphabet’s lackluster cloud performance and Iceland President Guoni Johannesson’s short speech at the Groska tech hub revealed an interesting phenomenon: some locales in the world, Iceland especially, are selling business leaders on avoiding the cloud for complex and expensive AI training and inference work.
Iceland’s approach, instead, is for businesses of all types to set up their own data centers with their own purchased or leased bare iron or to arrange for cloud services in the 400-mile wide island near the Arctic Circle to take advantage of the country’s use of hydroelectric power and geothermal heating. The big pitch is that power needs will be far cheaper in Iceland and just as reliable as anywhere.
The country of 400,000 people uses only a tiny percentage of fossil fuels for its power needs, thanks to an abundance of geologic activity that causes recurring minor earthquakes and some volcanic eruptions. Two massive tectonic plates are pulling apart at the rate of a centimeter a year along a fault line diagonally down the middle of Iceland, which helps activate the earth’s crust, heating water that the nation uses for power and an abundance of public and private spas, to the delight of tourists and residents alike.
“Wind, hydropower—we even have sun, although I’m not recommending solar for the future of Iceland. But sustainable and green energy, that’s us,” President Johannesson said. The historian-president is widely popular and in his second term, and also used the occasion to praise businesses that are increasingly hiring women workers, including some attending the DataCenter Forum event.
The day-long event featured a range of speakers who are setting up new data centers powered with hydropower and transforming geothermal into electricity. But the president and others took time to mention a women’s strike held Tuesday on the 48th anniversary of a more famous one that is tied to the election of the nation’s first female leader.