Since the financial crisis, Iceland has been forced to withdraw from the bubble in which he lived, and back to nature.Fortunately, there is plenty of that nature in which to find refuge.
Iceland is an amazing world of volcanoes, grasslands, endless winter and ethereal landscapes.
It is not, then one would think, the most obvious place to put millions of computer servers worldwide who are, despite their utility, a little less attractive.
But now this country is looking for exactly that: to become the world capital of computing power.
Behind all the big Internet companies are huge and growing data centers full of servers working.
It is believed that Google, for example, has about a million servers, but even less intensive computing operations, such as banks, require hundreds of thousands of servers to store all your information.
The problem is that while these computers seem innocuous enough energy use.
It is of course the energy required for the servers themselves, but almost as important is the energy used to cool."For every watt that is spent to operate the servers," says Dr. Brad Karp, University of London, "the best companies, who are more careful about optimizing efficiency found that typically spend between 40 and 60% energy extra chilling.
In Iceland, with its cool climate all year round and fresh, cold water would require only a fraction of that energy. That would represent a major savings.
On the outskirts of the capital, Reykjavik, work is advanced in the construction of a first site whose owners hope to start a frenzy of construction of buildings for servers.
In about a year if all goes well, begin the first companies to rent space in the datacenter.
And if this is successful, other centers are planned.
The sponsoring company expects demand to be huge because with increasing the number of servers worldwide, a large cloud looming environment: all that energy means an increase in CO2 production.
Iceland has more energy than can be used internally.
"The industry data centers is on par with the airline industry in terms of their carbon footprint," said Jeff Monroe, head of Verne Global, a company working data center in Iceland.
"But if you think about the growth of these two industries, growth in the data center industry is exponentially greater than that of the airlines.
Already producing as much CO2 as the airlines.
Verne Global thinks that soon the carbon footprint of the digital world will become "unacceptably high".
And that's when the natural resources of Iceland may be even more important.
Huge Savings
The volcanic forces that shaped the field also have given the country large amounts of geothermal energy. 100% of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources and is essentially free of carbon, much of it generated from water heated beneath the surface.
Monroe explained what would happen if a company moved its headquarters to Iceland.
"The carbon savings would be enormous."
"For example, if a large Internet company to operate thousands of servers in the relocated Iceland, the company would save more than half a million metric tons of carbon per year."
Thus we have a colder climate and an abundance of green energy.
But you would not want to move your data center to a site that is actually in the middle of nowhere, unless you have good connections to the world.
Iceland has been busy tending fiber optic cables to connect the country with North America and Europe.
The cables provide a capacity of more than five terabytes per second.
Traveling through this pipeline, the data stored in Iceland may be in London in just 17 milliseconds.
Being at home watching Youtube you would not know, but even that is too slow for some.
Gudmundur Gunnarson, head of communications company Farice, explains some of the problems.
"There are very sensitive to financial services can not go beyond the ring road surrounding London," he says.
"So everything has to be within that circle, but for about 70% of other traffic, this delay is not a serious problem."Even when speed is not a problem, however, the lure of Iceland is not for everyone.
Companies will have to overcome their natural tendencies to seek more and more servers, and some may have concerns regarding the safety of storing their data in a remote location.
But Iceland hopes that in the next five to ten years, this will be one of the major industries.
And in an ironic twist that will not go unnoticed in a nation impoverished by the collapse of the financial industry, it is rumored that one of the first customers to sign an agreement to move its servers to Iceland is just one of the largest investment banks United States.
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