The heat capacity of dry air is lower though, which I suspect is more important than the conductivity. Lower pressure also lowers heat capacity; you'll see a lot of electronics equipment with a specified maximum operating altitude of 10,000 feet for that reason. Incidentally, South Pole is around the same elevation, with local weather conditions varying the pressure over that range at times...

The bigger problems with keeping ICL (the IceCube Lab - where the computers on top of the detector live, also the biggest datacenter on the continent) are somewhat more mundane though:

* If memory serves, there's one air handler that brings in outside air. Like anything else, it occasionally breaks or needs maintenance, sometimes in the middle of winter.

* Anything that has to operate in outside-ish conditions there, like the air intake for example, needs to be simple and robust. I think that early on in ICL's life, they had problems with frost clogging up the intake louvers, but that was before my time with the project.

* South Pole Station gets Cold, and so you need to be careful with mixing a little bit of outside air with much warmer inside air, to keep the heat evenly distributed and temperature from fluctuating too much.

* The station's HVAC is controlled by a DDC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_digital_control) system, which is reputedly a pain to work on, and sometimes people get ideas about ways to improve it, which of course leads to new and interesting quirks in the system...

edit: formatting

Dry air also increases the probability of static damage. They probably can't use outside air exchange to cool the server room.

I imagine just circulating your nice toasty air into a larger area filled with moist humans who want to be warmer would work, but it depends on your building layout.

Static damage? Where I was raised, winter temps regularly reached -40. That cold, outside air already had most of the moisture 'wrung out of it'. Now let that cold dry air into the house and warm it: the relative humidity plummets.

Now walk across a carpet in leather-soled shoes. Do NOT even touch metal doorknobs, let alone metal faucets!

A favorite game of my siblings and I during the winter growing up in Minnesota was to shuffle across the floor and then poke each other.

In the winter (in MN), I usually wake up to my dog shocking us nose-to-nose while he checks if I'm still sleeping.

I'm kind of surprised he hasn't been trained out of this from the pain/surprise. Seems like sort of a shock collar effect.

There's a good article here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/04/coolest-jobs-in-tec... and a video here http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/07/23/the-d... but you're right, it doesn't mention the reason I give (and says now they do import some external cold air).