Will all datacentres end up in Siberia?

Article in GigaOM about where datacentres will be built notes that Siberia is a useful area:

Power is seen as the biggest constraint when it comes to building data center capacity. As a way around this conundrum, large consumers of Internet data center capacity have located their facilities closer to energy sources. For instance, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have built data centers in Quincy in the state of Washington near a hydroelectric dam where they pay a lot less for power than, say, in Silicon Valley. Google has built a massive facility in The Dalles, Oregon, another location close to power source.

There are 3 issues with Datacentre power needs:

(i) They need ever more power as they get bigger and pack more processors per square foot, and this means serious electricity - big ones consume the needs of cities or large industrial plants today.
(ii) Electricity has high transmission losses over distance, so its far more efficient to be close to power sources.
(iii) Nearly every watt of power sent into a datacentre is transformed into heat and needs to be removed, and this conumes as much (if not more) power than the datacentre computers. Being in cool climates and close to cooling sources helps hugely.

Thus, instead of great big mines, steel towns and smelting furnaces in the wilds, will we see datacentres and their attendant troglodytes being banished to Siberia?

it is not so far fetched to imagine that these and other companies could plan on building data centers in Russia. Microsoft has already made its intentions very clear and is planning a data center in Siberia. Google has been slowly expanding its presence in Russia including a recent purchase of Rambler for $140 million. Of course, the big problem is a lack of massive Internet backbone pipes in and out of Russia, but that might be an issue that could be addressed easily.

(Never mind the political/economic "features" of doing business in Russia....)

But, as the 90's showed us , given a speculative boom you can lay huge amounts of network cable very fast - and the transmission losses on data are far, far lower than for electricity. Big picture - the endgame for the big datamills is in cool climates next to serious powerplants. But that leads to strategic bottleneck issues so we expect to see other, smaller datacentres located elsewhere as well.

We also now also eagerly await the opening up of the Canadian Tundra (Hudson Bay Datamining and Searching ) and Antarctica as Datacentre havens too. And maybe even the north of Scotland.....