Iceland Looks to Serve the World

Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to retreat back from high octane bubble living to nature. Fortunately, there is a lot of that nature to retreat to. It is a breathtaking world of volcanoes, endless prairies and ethereal winter landscapes. Not, you might think, the most obvious place to stick millions of the world’s computer servers which are, for all their uses, rather less attractive. But the country now wants exactly that — to become home to the world’s computing power. Behind all the large internet companies lurk massive and ever growing data centres chock full of servers churning away. Google for instance is thought to have around a million of the things, but even less IT intensive operations, banks for example, need hundreds of thousands of servers to store all their data