Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems
Well it’s certainly better environmentally than using conventional air conditioning, doubt it would heat up the oceans significantly
Would it heat up the oceans: yes.
Significantly:no.
If this pans out it would be a lot better than what we are doing now.
There was this quote they gave when asked about impact to the surrounding ocean.
Natick uses raw sea water for cooling, with the water returned to the ocean a fraction of a degree warmer than ambient. Due to rapid mixing in ocean currents, the temperature impact just a few meters downstream of the datacenter is undetectable. We used cameras on the exterior of the vessel to observe wildlife during deployment. We found that the datacenter provided an attractive location for sea life, and was quickly colonized by multiple species of fish and other sea life.
At a huge scale, that maybe could be an issue if you extrapolate. But as others have pointed out, data centers today already require air and water cooling which isn’t likely as efficient so net gain on the environment is probably worse with land data centers in terms of cooling. And they noted the hardware inside had a higher reliability, potentially due to its pure nitrogen atmosphere in the capsule, so that’s less need for buying replacement servers and performing maintenance.
No clue if this thing is actually feasible beyond small scale due to the very high deploy and retrieval costs. But in my opinion this isn’t like some environmentally oblivious solution.
At the limit, it could depend on the extent to which adding heat to the ocean has different/worse effects than adding it to the atmosphere. E.g. maybe ocean heat is worse for wildlife or disrupts currents or doesn’t radiate away into space as fast, or something like that.
Definitely not a problem to worry about in the short-term, of course. But then again, the same was said about lots of other problems back in the day that we do have to worry about now, so…
Would you kindly swap out the memory on that server?
The container is regarded as a single unit; if a server inside the container fails the functions of that server are offloaded to another available server and it is taken out of service.
Once enough servers in a container are offline the entire unit has all computational load offloaded to another, identical container with sufficient capacity.
Then the now-offline unit is retrieved and serviced; probably a ground-up rebuild of all components.
… but I do like the idea of some dude in a wetsuit trying to replace a memory stick.
Yeah that’s totally more environmently friendly to chuck hardware to the mercy of salt water… What could go wrong there??
The salt water won’t come into contact with anything except pumps, a heat exchanger and the exterior of the container.
The servers live in a nitrogen environment, so it reduces corrosion, I doubt there would be any dirt or dust. It’s going to be an incredible sterile environment.
No one does maintenance on the server farms. It costs more money to send someone in than to let the parts slowly die until the farm no longer is economically viable. Once that happens, you sell the whole farm to a recycler.
It would take quite a bit of energy to effect things on a global scale but it could cause some issues at a very local level.
Not really. It’s not like there’s a nuke reactor in there.
There isn’t a nuke reactor in there, is there?
Now you’re talkin!
At the deployment site, a remotely operated vehicle retrieved a cable containing the fiber optic and power wiring from the seafloor and brought it to the surface where it was checked and attached to the datacenter, and the datacenter powered on.
Sadly, it sounds like power is coming from the shore.
Underwater datacenters could also serve as anchor tenants for marine renewable energy such as offshore wind farms or banks of tidal turbines, allowing the two industries to evolve in lockstep.
But I think this is their plan for energy in the future.
Onshore, wind turbines sprout from farmers’ rolling fields and solar panels adorn roofs of centuries-old homes, generating more than enough electricity to supply the islands’ 10,000 residents with 100 percent renewable energy. A cable from the Orkney Island grid sends electricity to the datacenter, which requires just under a quarter of a megawatt of power when operating at full capacity.
It’s still pretty darn clean.
It’s not clean at all. You’re burying disposable hardware into extremely corrosive salt water and then throwing away the whole thing when it fails. What the fuck is green about that?
Yeah, the Orkney Islands are also experimenting with tidal generators (Wikipedia/European Marine Energy Centre), though the weather there is ideal for wind energy.
