[aetherson]

I was chatting about this with a friend. It feels like there's a real opportunity for a relatively-poor-but-democratic country to say, "Look, for real, we will pass the strongest data protection laws in the world, and we will let you build as many solar panels as you want + use as much water as you want, just sink a couple hundred billion into OUR economy."

[thfuran]

Who is that meant to entice?

[aetherson]

People who build data centers. Strong data protection laws (in a relatively stable democratic country) so that customers will feel okay putting their workloads in a data center, and then low regulatory burden and cost to the inputs to making a data center work (mainly electricity and water for cooling).

There would obviously still be things that would make a data center builder feel less-than-great about locating in a developing country, but there's also a LOT of money sloshing around in the data center buildout right now, if you could get people to just try it out with a small minority of their money it could be a very big deal for some countries.

[saguntum]

You might enjoy the plot of Cryptonomicon