its likely more expensive, since maintenance logistics to fix, replace chips is higher than one on land. the only offset is the cooling effects at deeper waters. since they are barely paying for electricity , or water as it is on land.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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So when do we start putting big ice cubes in the ocean?
(Really this at least makes more sense then land slop centers, still silly)
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How many AI datacenters will it take to boil the ocean?
It would probably take more energy than we can harvest on earth, considering the sunlight and geothermal energy doesn't boil it currently.
I could see it affecting the temperature on local scales, such as the area immediately around the data center.
I don't think people mean literally boil the ocean. Just increasing it by few Celsius degrees can be world ending.
That's true, but I still don't think we can raise ocean temperatures through direct cooling and renewable sources the way that the greenhouse effect can. Water can absorb a lot of heat energy without changing temperature, and that is why regions close to oceans have a more temperate climate.
While I don't have enough knowledge in this field to be making any definitive statements, my logic is as follows:
- outside of nuclear fission/fusion reactions, heat energy on the earth's surface comes from either the sun or molten rock in the core
- that energy is responsible for everything that happens on earth, including wind energy
So we would need to get energy from off planet, use nuclear fission/fusion, or cover enough of the land area in wind and solar farms in order to redirect the sun's energy over to the oceans.
I think the bigger concern, when it comes to heating the ocean, is that manufacturing, construction, and transport related to the data centers still releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Those gases trap the sun's energy within our atmosphere and that WILL heat up the earth. Way more than direct cooling using ocean water.
I'm a scuba diver and you can definitely harm regions of ocean with water pumps. It's already happening in place where nuclear is being cooled. It's already happening in ship yards.
It's hard to speculate how it would happen at scale though because ocean science is real fucking hard and each location is vastly different. In populated places the damage would be very noticeable if not eventually catastrophic as ocean issues compound real fast as the ecosystem is much more fluid.
That being said I imagine there would be ways to deploy this safely (ocean is big, lots of boring dead space) but I dont have trust in us to find this way.
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There are a number of 6-8GWe nuclear plants that dump 15+GW into the nearby sea (or in the case of Bruce, into Lake Huron). I don't see it being much of an issue. Better than virtually any other cooling option.
The issues are maintenance, energy source, and equipment supply.
The plants on the lakes so monitor the water temp so they don't affect the ecosystem during the warmer seasons still.
But I doubt the one in NB had to worry about that when more water flows by it than all the rivers in the world combined.
But yes, much better source of cooling at the cost of maintenance and equipment. Just like tidal power but with fewer moving parts.
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Good point, although on the local scale you mention, wildlife could still be impacted. Hopefully, the overall impact on the ecosystem will be monitored and studied before expanding these data centers more broadly.
Around (4 to 6) * 10^(26 to 27) J total
1 gigawatt is 10^9 J/s (so around 130 billion years to reach the above.) For a terawatt that's 130 million years. For a petawatt 130,000 years. For an exawatt about 130 years....
Note: the sun bathes Earth with around 170,000 TW (0.17 exawatts) of energy. That's about 700-800 years if you could make the oceans sink all that sun energy. Again, this isn't the total output of the Sun but just what impacts Earth directly.
Well, if the energy comes from solar on the thingy, then it's probably going to cool the ocean, could be similar with wind.
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sudo systemctl poweroff
OH FUCK I was in an ssh session!
*Puts on scuba gear
Hopefully that server has IPMI.
Deep sea ~~welder~~ admin.
Most stressful job imaginable
At least you won't have to deal with end-users on site.
China says
China, you have lied to me too many times.
This is pretty impressive. If only China had a good human rights record. But then again there's only a few countries that do and none of them are superpowers.
So there's a non-zero chance we will find out later that it's just a bathysphere full of children doing math.
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China: "We will use the oceans water". usa: "We will use the citizens drinking water".
Oh don't worry. Chinese citizens already can't drink their water.
That's from the 90's, the more modern study shows a pretty big but gradual improvement
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969720374544
If only the US had a coastline.
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I'd really like to know how they handle all the small-scale HW issues. As a DC tech, I'm kept quite busy with those
I bet they duplicate everything and just switch off faulty units. Every year or so, they would emerge the whole thing and replace what they need at a large scale.
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There was an Intel experiment a while back where they left a bunch of racks in the parking lot. They found that the failure rate wasn't much higher than inside, and not needing a data center building saved money. Maybe this project just accepts the eventual failure of components.
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:Yawn: Worlds first? Microsoft already did this.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
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Lol just wait until someone needs to replace something
I wonder how cost effective this will be in the long run considering how much they'll have to deal with corrosion. I imagine the maintenance will become pretty overwhelming in a year or two.
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The world-first part must be the wind-power thing.
We've had small offshore data centers for years, passively cooled but powered by nuclear energy.
(And if you're still not getting the joke, let's discuss how a nuke sub would cool its massive computing power. Big boats are like floating data centers; submarines even more advanced. )