Over at Longtail.com — Canada Unstable?
Chris Anderson posted this paragraph within a longer bit about Kevin Kelly’s recent story in Wired…
To that legal point, I was recently chatting in Seattle with a guy who runs the largest collection of server farms in North America outside of Google–he actually owns many of the facilities that Amazon’s EC2 service and Microsoft’s cloud computing initiatives are running on. Like everyone in that business these days, he’s all about finding cheaper electricity. But although his facilities are all in the Pacific Northwest, using clean and relatively cheap hydro power, he hasn’t crossed the border into Canada, where the hydro power is even more plentiful.
Why not? Because of political instability. Canada’s governments shift from right to left too often, he said, and the threat of regional secession was too real to risk putting multi-hundred-million-dollar data facilities there–between changes in the laws to even the slight risk of nationalization should the wrong person be elected, he thought Canada’s political liabilities outweighed its energy assets. Surprised? I was.
Ha. I hope this guy tells everybody we only have salt water in our lakes.
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