Servers in Iceland now outnumber residents – and get the electricity first

According to a new count, the servers in Iceland's data centres now outnumber the country's residents. They are said to be easy to live with, never complain about the weather, and are the only group in the country that appreciates the Icelandic summer.

“The cold is our greatest natural resource,” says the managing director of a data centre on the Reykjanes peninsula. “Until now we've exported it in the form of tourists unhappy with the weather. Now we can finally sell it directly.”

Data centres now use more electricity than all of the country's homes combined. At the same time, energy companies have warned that supply to the public may have to be curtailed this winter. Asked whether it would be more sensible to curtail supply to the data centres first, a spokesman for one of them replies: “The data centres have a contract. Households just have a need.”

“I read in the paper that my electricity was going towards training artificial intelligence,” says Hallgrímur (67) in Ísafjörður. “So I asked the artificial intelligence if that was true. It said it couldn't comment, but offered to write me a poem about electricity.”

New data centres are under construction in four places around the country. One of them will be used to calculate where best to build the next data centre. That data centre will then be used to calculate whether there is enough electricity for it.

Municipalities are competing to attract data centres, which bring in considerable property tax and up to five jobs each. In one municipality in South Iceland, a new data centre was welcomed with a parade. The servers didn't attend but sent an automated greeting.

The first data centre to run entirely on wind power is expected to open next year, once a site has been found where the wind is steady enough, the environmental assessment is complete and the neighbours have given up.