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points by mike_hearn 3 days ago | 0 comments

The possibilities are:

- America. Much harder since the elections. Not appealing.

- Europe. Doesn't have enough electricity with anti-AI, anti-big tech and high tax governments. Not appealing.

- Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

- Africa. No.

- Middle East. Your GPU cluster might get blown up. No.

- China. To some extent yes. Plenty of power and space, pro-AI government, but many companies don't want to send their IP to a country famous for copying it and they're still under GPU sanctions.

- Japan, Korea, etc. Maybe. They're not really famous for big datacenters though.

- Australia, Canada. Possible, but you're exposed to Europe-style political risks.

There just aren't many places on Earth where it's realistic to build and operate AI datacenters once political issues and grid constraints are taken into account.

[–] DrewADesign 3 days ago

Come on… this is exponentially too reductive to be a serious counterpoint. Also, 0% of the problems you cited are likely to be less expensive than building in space. And do you imagine being in space would make your data centers more or less defensible against the likes of Russia?

[–] olmo23 3 days ago

We're currently building 500+ datacenters in the EU?

[–] mike_hearn 3 days ago

Yeah? By "datacenter" are we talking about the kind of gigawatt scale facilities dedicated to AI they're casually tossing around in the USA? I haven't heard of any such projects that actually got off the ground. Stargate UK was paused. If so where do they get their natural gas from.

[–] rbanffy 2 days ago

> - Latin America. Expensive, likely to have your assets appropriated by socialists. Not appealing.

I had to laugh. Not sure what Kool Aid you’ve been drinking, but you should stop.

[–] mike_hearn 2 days ago

Latin American countries have a long history of appropriating expensive industrial assets, what do you think is so crazy about this?

[–] rbanffy 2 days ago

I laughed at the “likely”. How many times have foreign industrial assets been seized? Just in the past few years there has been huge foreign investments in Brazil (which is the one I follow more closely) covering assets that depreciate much slower than an AI datacenter. And all that under a government opponents call “communist”.

It’s far more likely the American companies will appropriate the government, as it has happened much too frequently, especially in Latin America.

[–] mike_hearn 1 day ago

Quite a lot of times? Brazil has an active programme of seizing land even today.

https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2026/01/30/brazil-advances-a...

They also love pressuring tech companies over content, something much easier if they have expensive assets in the country.

There are still court cases pending over Venezuela's expropriation of assets.

https://tlblog.org/d-c-circuit-allows-venezuela-expropriatio...

Argentina was seizing multi-billion dollar oil firms as recently as fifteen years ago.

You're going to say, but those aren't datacenters. No, because nobody builds big datacenters in Latin America, because they have a history of nationalizing valuable assets.

[–] rbanffy 23 hours ago

Do not confuse agrarian reform with state appropriation of farmland. Agrarian reform aims at unproductive land and sustainable farming development.

Tech companies operating in a country have to comply with said country’s laws. In the specific case of Brazil, compliance with judicial orders is not optional. I remember Twitter was blocked because Elon tried to be non-compliant by firing everyone and thus having no representative in Brazil. It obviously didn’t work. The US forced similar adjustment on TikTok and doesn’t seem to hesitate trying to impose American laws outside its territory.

Most countries consider mineral resources to be state-owned if they are located within their national borders. Bribing officials and installing puppet governments only takes you so far, and occasionally local governments grow backbones to allow them to oppose exploitation.

And courts in the US have no jurisdiction outside their borders. If there is a legitimate complaint, it can be brought to the WTO or other similar international court. Unfortunately, in order to avoid prosecution for war crimes, the US chose not to be part of the ICC.