Ice Dragon Datacenter

We have had a very interesting proposal of placing a new large datacenter in the enormous lair of the ice dragon Iseldur. I've looked into it, and I'm forced to conclude it's a bad idea.

On the plus side, it offers free cooling. What is more, the dragon produces the cold by apparently unlimited supernatural means, so we can set up a heat pump to produce all required electricity as well. The lifetime cost of electricity for our servers exceeds their lifetime material cost, so this is quite a significant savings. Normally this could also spill over into a side business of selling unlimited power back to the grid.

The caverns are large enough to house about 5000 new Microsoft Azure stamps, with hundreds of compute and storage SKU machines each. Fully utilizing this opportunity would greatly expand our capacity. However, Azure data is required to be both reliable and durable, and this data center would rely on a dragon. Dragons are not known for their reliability. Also, were it to be killed, or catch a cold and die, it would represent a single point of failure for the entire region. Such stamps should be configured as georedundant reliability zones, paired with other zones elsewhere with more conventional support.

On the minus side, the dragon's lair is in Greenland, and the dragon is uninterested in moving. Selling excess power is impractical due to lack of infrastructure connecting Greenland to anyplace that needs power. Heat pumps are also challenging due to Greenland being excessively cold, even outside of the dragon's lair.

Greenland contains no significant customers, and most major customers are bound by national laws to store their data within the borders of their own country. Greenland is technically part of Denmark, but Denmark already has adequate data centers for the foreseeable future. Lack of fiberoptic connectivity also limits potential customers. The most promising remaining customers are large, self-contained, and unconcerned with national boundaries: large secret government projects, for example.

A further minus is that datacenters need maintenance. When components die, on-site technicians need to pull them out and replace them. There is a dearth of technicians in Greenland. Worse, the dragon considers servers in its lair as part of its hoard. It objects to having pieces of them removed (even to be replaced by new working components). The dragon voices its objection by eating the technicians. Leaving the broken components in the dragon's lair also will not work: the dragon allows the technician to do the repair and deposit the broken pieces, then eats the technician anyhow. The dearth of technicians in Greenland willing to be eaten by a dragon is insurmountable. The dragon datacenter will not work.

There may be a silver lining: we may be able to use the dragon to solve our problem of electronic waste disposal. The dragon himself is also a clever fellow. Perhaps we should interview him for a job position.

This was in response to a prompt on reddit.com r/WritingPrompts, "You are an ice dragon who has been asleep for thousands of years. You are awakened by a group of tiny humans who promise you an unfathomable amount of wealth. They call themselves "Microsoft" and ask that allow them to move a large number black boxes into the unnatural chill of your lair."