Iceland provides northern lights for Europe’s digital neighbourhood

Digital backbone

These messages have been taken on board by the leaders in Iceland’s datacentre industry. At Datacentre Forum, the country’s leaders in the industry highlighted the potentials and possibilities of Iceland’s digital infrastructure and how it will allow the country and the Nordic region in general to become the sustainable digital backbone of Europe.

And before the low-cost, energy-efficient datacentres can do their magic, the digital backbone of the country is essential, and the key to how the country can digitally locate itself tens of degrees of latitude further south.

Datacentre provider Borealis Data Center revealed stats showing that its network – based on four submarine cables that bridged continents – supported connectivity with a latency as low as 12ms to a landing point in Galway in the Republic of Ireland, with similar connections to a site in the north of Scotland. From these links were short hops to financial centres in Dublin and London and the rest of the two countries. Fellow provider atNorth quoted latency round-trip times of 18ms to Frankfurt; 18.4ms to London; 17.3ms to Amsterdam; 20ms to Paris; 15ms to Copenhagen; and 15.4ms to Oslo.

With such connectivity established, Borealis outlined to the conference a number of key challenges in its mission, principally meeting the goals of the EU Green Deal and climate neutrality by 2050. It was aiming for a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030; increase use in renewable energy; and a general improvement in energy efficiency. In terms of power efficiency, the company was quoting 100% renewable sources with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.03, with 0.38g of CO₂-e/kWh electric carbon intensity.

From a computation standpoint, Borealis assured that its infrastructure was optimised to handle high-performance computing (HPC) and high-density workloads (such as AI) with demanding energy and cooling requirements for computer-intensive applications. Overall, it said it can offer clients a secure, reliable and cost-efficient site that fulfils future needs in terms of sustainability and scalability.

One such client is IBM Cloud. The IT giant said its own customers – including American Airlines, Exxon Mobile, Geico and Walgreens – made workload decisions based on five key dimensions, that is resiliency, performance, security, compliance and total cost of ownership. The two companies were uniting to offer a service – Borealis Cloud by IBM and Borealis Data Center – that was designed to serve businesses in a range of use cases where maximising energy usage and cutting on emissions were “crucial”. Among these would be data storage and backup, regulated workloads, and addressing data residency.

For its part, atNorth revealed it was working with a company, somewhat ironically, based in the fossil fuel exploration industry on what was described as a journey of true cost and CO₂-savings. The datacentre was being used in processing data from seismic explorations at sea, using a variety of connectivity offerings including Starlink satellites. In the computer mix was a need for cloud used in a burst model for workloads exceeding on-premise resources which needed to be run hot.

For these operations, atNorth was offering significant advantages compared with UK datacentres with regards to PUE, tonnes of CO₂ footprint, and in particular with CO₂/kWh. The exploration company calculated that by 2024, its UK datacentre operations bill could be in the region of £173,000 per month, while that in Iceland would be in the region of £14,000.

State-owned company Farice boasts an annual turnover of €13m, and was established in 2002 to provide connectivity to service providers and datacentres on a wholesale level, city to city. It built FARICE-1 to Scotland then a second cable in DANICE to Denmark 2009. A third cable, IRIS RFS, was finally spliced in March 2023.

The company said that in 2023, the three submarine cables have increased theoretical availability tenfold, plus with massive speed gains. It can now provide an Iceland to Dublin POP to POP, end-to-end link with travelling time/latency reduced from 24ms to 10.5ms with a round trip of 21ms, a digital neighbourhood speed. The London time was reduced from 18.5ms to 15ms. With its Irish connection, Farice in very much plugged into a number of global networking routes principally to the western seaboard of France, Portugal and Spain, and potentially going all the way to Japan.

One of Farice’s assurances is that its submarine cables have never had an underwater cut during their lifetime, yet this has now been put front-of-mind since 24 October, when scientists at the Icelandic Met Office began monitoring a rise in seismic activity on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which may signal an impending volcanic eruption.

Commenting on the ramifications of this, Business Iceland, responsible for the branding and marketing of Iceland and Icelandic export industries, noted that the heightened intensity of these seismic events, particularly near the town of Grindavík, is seen as a significant indicator of potential volcanic activity in the area. 

Addressing the issue of potential interruptions to the datacentre industry, it added: “It is impossible to predict the exact timing and location of a potential eruption … Iceland is no stranger to volcanic activity and experiences a volcanic event every five years, on average. Three eruptions have occurred on the Reykjanes Peninsula in the past three years, none of which caused harm to people or disrupted air traffic. Icelandic authorities and the public are highly prepared for such events, and Iceland has one of the world’s most effective volcanic preparedness measures. Iceland’s geoscientists possess vast experience in dealing with volcanic activities.”

In short, an air of measured calm, and certainly not complacency, is in order. As the clients heading towards the island have shown, the datacentre industry may be sitting on top of seismic activity, but it’s also sitting on a potential technology goldmine.