Iceland the new green tech hub?

Future of Tech reports.

Data centres - where all of our e-mails, photos, documents and text messages are stored when they are shipped off to the proverbial cloud - currently consume upwards of 1.5% of total global electricity use, according to Verne Global, a server farm company that opened doors in Iceland this February.

According to Technology Review, Verne opened a large server farm on an old Nato base near Iceland's main airport and began offering "100% renewable" computing services to the rest of the world. It's one of three data centres in Iceland and part of what Iceland's government hopes will be a new local industry.

Iceland produces more electricity per capita than any other country in the world. Nearly all its power is renewable, coming from either glacier-fed rivers or steaming geothermal vents. And it's cheap, too. At 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, electrons on the island cost around half the average retail rate in the US.

Invest in Iceland, a government-funded agency in Reykjavik, estimates that Verne's data centre could create up to 100 jobs for Icelanders. While that's a modest start, things "can move really fast if some large players in the market decide to set up", says Arnar Gudmundsson, a project manager at Invest in Iceland.