Comment by astahlx
6 days ago
I do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the site of the data center. Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?
A big reason to not do it lower down in europe is also just that it's naturally very cold in northern norway so you already save on energy that would be needed to cool it. Meta has datacenters at around the same latitude but in sweden for the same reason.
I've imagined for a long time that eventually we'll shift the bulk of our heavy computation closer to the poles, and use those data centers to power our society. You either use solar power and shift the computation from north pole to south pole seasonally depending on which place is in eternal sunshine, or, since these places are so far away from major population centers, you could just plop down a bunch of giant nuclear reactors without too much resistance.
You might even be able to sell some of that heat to a local heat network to supply other businesses and homes.
Indeed the article explicitly says they intend to do so.
It'll be a bit less cold in northern norway with this thing - accelerating ice cap melt and sea level rise.
Doomsday cult.
All of modern life does that. AI could also bring some solutions instead of just perpetuating problems. And on a cost per intelligence token basis it's obscenely cheap anyway.
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I understand why they didn’t choose Germany: they didn’t want to buy the GPUs in cash and send the receipts via Fax.
And as a reward you pay one of the highest electricity costs in Europe.
this is so hilariously true
> Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?
Yes, this is basically the case. It's quite expensive to transfer power across several degrees of latitude, and as a result, the price of power in the south of Norway is sometimes orders of magnitude higher than in the north.
Maybe solar and wind aren't viable as they might seem, and/or, Norway isn't as populous as people would think. Total population is just 5.5m, which is the scale of an average US state or a major city in Asia. Workload would be smaller than typical mental image of "a gigantic AI datacenter that serves everyone in a country".
Northern Norway has lot of cheap and stable hydro capacity. The prices there for baseload power are cheap. Interesting part of that market is that they lack internal north-south transfer capacity. So much that Finland which has relatively more north-south capacity has cheaper electricity at same latitude than in Norway...
Norway has a good amount of power generation, and most notably, excellent hydro storage, meaning it has a good spread of cheaper power, rather than peaks and valleys of high and low cost like the UK has (which has lots of wind, but little storage).
https://euenergy.live
2 €/MWh today
Well, for one they have a lot of money and would be a good customer for a government AI
It could be that solar and wind is not a good way to power the datacenter.
Geothermal is a big deal in Norway as well.
We have about 99% hydro power, Iceland is the geothermal county.
But there is also plenty of oil to run the backup generators...
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