Work is advancing on a state-of-the-art data server center just outside Reykyavik. The country has also been laying fiber optic cable that will be able to transmit large amounts of data to Europe and North America at latencies of just 17 milliseconds. Google alone is believed to have on the order of a million server computers in data center locations around the world.<\/p>\n
All of those computers demand power, and added to the electrical bills is the power needed to keep the rooms they sit in cooled. Even the most efficiently tuned server box can require from 40 to 60 percent extra power for cooling purposes. Verne Holdings<\/a> has sunk over 300 million US into the data center outside of Reykyavik in hopes of creating 100 or more jobs and demonstrating the possibilities.<\/p>\n Iceland is betting its cold climate and abundant geothermal power will entice data centers to move their servers to the North Atlantic island country. The ever-growing Internet industry powerhouses like Google, YouTube (which is now getting over one billion visits per month), Amazon, Twitter, and MySpace all rely on massive numbers of data servers churning away in the background.<\/p>\n Data centers use chillers to refrigerate water for the server cooling systems. This allows them to use highly concentrated clusters of computers in dense racks of blade servers. These industrial strength chillers demand industrial-scale electricity. It just so happens that Iceland’s low energy cost already has led major aluminum and ferrosilicon producers to locate plants in the country.<\/p>\n The government of Iceland began to promote the country for data center development in 2007, but after the events of 2008, when Iceland experienced a [6.1 Richter earthquake](http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/europe\/7426369.stm) and a banking industry collapse, projects and customers have been slow to materialize.<\/p>\nChilled Datacenters<\/h2>\n