Because European countries are politically stable and are under the rule of law. Things that are rather priceless and can't be bought with money.

Those drones hitting high-rise hotels in Dubai were rather eye opening.

I agree with your point about rule of law, but let’s not gloat too quickly about nasty SA getting its comeuppance. It’s going to look pretty ugly in Europe when Russia follows through on its potential to disrupt or destroy critical infrastructure. We are pretty vulnerable too.

the UK is stable? economically it's falling pretty hard and the governments seem to be a revolving door

The UK has got a huge amount of wind power that can be purchased ahead of time at better rates than listed in that table, it's also got some bottlenecks with power distribution (especially between Scotland and the rest of the UK) which will take years to fix so there area areas where decent power contracts can be had for customers who can build out fairly quickly (datacentre operators with large power requirements).

"The UK has got a huge amount of wind power"

Very little wind today here in Scotland and for most of this week - which is a pleasant change I guess...

Oh look! A bird!

Weather is not climate. A datum is not data.

The UK has way less cheap wind than the US has cheap hydro. Let alone cheap solar.

People want to do all kinds of idiotic things which make no sense. We've had excess compute/gpu since 2010. People didn't know what do with all that excess and started bitcoin and tens of thousands of crypto, followed by NFT. The claim was crypto will solve all problems, which hasn't happened. Now, everyone moved on to AI, AI will do this, that and everything else and also take away all your white collar and creative jobs.

Even third world countries like India which can't provide basic services to their citizens, have no water, no power, no sanitation or cleanliness are giving hundreds of billions of dollars in incentives (land, power, water, tax subsidies) to hyperscalers, to create at most 2.6 jobs. Google clearing land to build India's largest data centre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBJPf6Pxfvs

> The UK has even higher energy costs and people seem to want to build data centers here? (Or at least they say they do - looks more like land speculation to me):

There is no meaning to what politicians and crony capitalists do. It is all lies, theft and grift.

The reality here in the UK does not always match the ambition though.

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/microsoft-pul...

Both our high energy prices and the current capabilities of our energy distribution network relative to the renewable generation and storage capacity we are trying to move towards are significant barriers.