JK but the oceans aren’t really warming up fast enough. Maybe a buttload of gpus may help?
Yupp, I’ve heard that the sea need more help heating up…
What a beautiful coincidence.
I am building ethically sourced, renewable, solar powered torpedoes, and I will not be seeking regulatory approval.
because the ocean warming and inevitable collapse of the gulf stream wasnt happening fast enough, apparently.
And less tax and worker protection laws in international waters.
Data centers arent big on the job creation front to begin with. Once they are built its basically a security guy for show, and a tech that flies in once a fortnight to deal with the odd, occasional issue.
a floating datacenter would probably have even less jobs, since they probably wont need the security guard to keep the punk kids away anymore.
Yes, however the ship itself will need maintenance and operators, and can be flagged in whatever country of convenience that offers the best ability to pay the least. No property taxes, far fewer environmental rules, free water, etc.
Who only float out, what, once a fortnight? And thats probably being generous… Probably be a drone ship that spends 98% of its time on autopilot with someone only intervening when an issue pops up.
It’s slightly less stupid than data centers in space I suppose. But I still find it pretty weird.
You will have to be tethered to land anyway. Properly high bandwidth networking as you would usually see to connect a data center (on the order of a dozen terabits per second) only exists through fiber optic cables. I’m sure of this point, because optical networking is my day-job, though we only run 400 Gbit/s links on the fastest edges since we’re a small national network.
As for power, well there are 80 MW ship engines (e.g. Wärtsilä-Sulzer RT-flex96C, which has even been built in Korea under license before), so it’s not impossible I suppose. But if you are tethered, then the country you’re tethered to will probably forbid you from burning bunker fuel for 80 MW on its coast. At which point you’d be reduced to running clean diesel or something. That I expect would make the power more costly than just tethering to an electric grid
So now we have a big barge rather than a ship. What do you really save then? I guess the price of the land? And you gain access to copious amounts of saltwater, so you can do closed loop cooling with freshwater, and do the secondary heat exchange to the ocean. But you could do that by building on the coast too. Okay I guess you might gain tsunami security over a coastal building.
If this is a real proposal why don’t they tell us the material advantages they expect, rather than making us guess?
Insurance scuttles, here we come
Sovereignty.
Country gets a new hostile government or prsident? Guess we’ll just sail our datacenters somewhere else
Heating up random parts of the ocean, can only good happen!
The amount of heat is going to be negligible for the ocean, especially compared to a permanent structure pumping heat into the ground or a neighborhood. I’m more worried about how they’re powering the things. Probably some fossil fuel.
Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean. These center produce large amounts of heat. Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean.
Once we open this box, tons of companies will follow.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-centers-temperature-spikes
There have been and are hundreds of thousands of natural underwater volcanoes that create heat far surpassing data centers…
Based on that I would like to know why you think data center heat would have an effect noticeable past those volcanoes.
Volcanoes are natural. They aso create land, enrich soil, and the ash has helped with warming. Most happen underwater which never effect the surface due to how deep they are.
A floating toaster oven will increase over time. The increase heat will create FUCKING UPDRAFTS. Messing with our trade winds and jet stream is a great way to game over.
Also our jet stream has been dipping farther and farther south. Creating more volatile situations.
I am pretty sure you are letting your dislike of data centers cloud your judgement of how large their heat related impact can be.
Relative to the vastness of the oceans a data center is so negligible that I feel you don’t understand the size of the ocean at all.
They would have to build a million data centers, yes, a million (or perhaps even millions, plural) , to have any heat impact which is economically and resource related impossible. For reference, all data centers worldwide on land now count 11k.
Don’t let your personal dislike of something cloud your ability for rational analysis.
Reasonability of the solution aside, Samsung is uniquely positioned to propose such project as one of the largest electronics manufacturer and shipmaker in the world.
Wait, isn’t this what happened in Snowcrash?
Terrible article. Does not answer the “why” question. What is the advantage? All it says is that “Seasides can ease the pains of giant mainland AI date centers”. Is it just skirting around taxes and rules, like a floating casino? The ship would have a shoreside power connection or power itself as well apparently. Would the ships generators be subject to the same emission requirements as shoreside plants?
Seems like just a floating barge that will not really be out at sea, just sitting in protected bays or up waterways. Cooling water, would have to use a closed circuit freshwater system with heat exchangers cooling it with saltwater. That would consume less water than the evaporation cooling method, but still is not listed a possible reason.
Ships are expensive. What is the reason for floating a data center? Cheaper than land near big cities? Less regulations? Less taxes? Cooling water? Cheaper electricity?
They’re doing it to grab the headlines away from Solar Roadways!!
Some large companies have been experimenting with underwater data centres for years. i remember reading about a microsoft one like 10 years ago.
Yeah but those were not on ships.
This seems like the sort of idea that on the surface sounds really innovative and “outside the box” but will sink like a stone when put into action
Data centers in space, data centers on ships… it’s likely just an attempt to avoid laws and oversight.
And just like all the libertarian attempts to escape the horrors of being taxed and regulated by taking to the sea this too will fail catastrophically
We’ll get to see REAL digital piracy on the high seas!
Bears will eat the data centres, somehow
Would you kindly stop being so pessimistic?
No, no I don’t think I will
Seems you did not mean to make a BioShock reference. oh well, worth a try =)
Did you just vicariously woosh me via myself?
I… I’m not sure? Now I am confused, ¿?¿
Whatever the case may be, would you kindly have a great day now? ;)
Or just a way for someone that owns a rocket company to get a trillion dollars. Maybe someone making ships can get a cool $100B from
suckersinvestors.In the dot com bubble it was a running joke where someone would take any business idea and and add “on the internet” onto it. “We’ll sell dogfood… on the internet!” Boom! A billion dollars in VC money.
So now it’s take anything and add “using AI” to it. This is even better, it’s not just “using AI” it’s “and put a bunch of AI chips on it.”
“We build ships.” Yawn. “We build ships and put a bunch of AI chips on it” Ok, here’s your $100 Billion!
¿Por qué no los dos? You can excite the fascist libertarians and still get the attention of the people who blow their load the moment someone adds “AI” to a product.
will sink like a stone
Microsoft already tested underwater data centres ages ago.
That makes a lot more sense to me, keeping something on the bottom of the ocean is much easier that keeping something floating on it
Yes, but I think maintenance is easier on the surface.
We have an opening for a system admin.
Requirements:
- Experience maintaining production servers at scale
- In depth knowledge of security best practices, prevention, mitigation
- SCUBA certification
- Aquatic self-defense skills
Connection will suck. Imagine this thing and its delicate hardware hit by 10m high waves all the time.
These datacenters will probably be used for AI training, or they will get their own ocean cables.
It’ll have to have a satellite connection and that will go out if there’s a storm.
Im somewhat surprised nobody has mentioned how corrosive salt water is. This likely would have to be some platform like an oil rig with power and internet via cables. So why not buy Sealand and build it out? Still lots oft Saltwater in the Wind and offshore but no need to have it floating around in rough waters.
The nation of Sealand cannot be bought!
Cheaper to build and maintain probably. You can dock a ship for a while but you need to bring manpower to a platform
Ironic, considering AI is built on piracy
Poseidon plz 🥺
Pirates are gonna have an awesome day. I will buy all the stuff they can steal from it.
I’ll take some cpus and a few gpus. And 1tb for ram. What do you mean 200$ for 1tb of ram?? The last pirate said 100$!
Is this the sign of the upcoming pirate age?
The real One Piece is the datacenters Samsung made along the way
No it’s a sign of delusion by these companies and governments.
We’re sorry Mr Robertoe, the pirates, they stole your data. You should change your password right away!
Makes infinitely more sense than in space.
Power, maintainence, and cooling all seem easier
Honestly, if it was mandated that data centers are only allowed to use renewable energy, this wouldn’t be too bad.
Would waste heat go into the air or water? What affects could that have?
I’m more worried about the sound pollution. Sound travels so much farther underwater and things like sonar are god awful for marine life. I can only noise reduction will not be prioritized when building these things quickly.
If the electricity comes from renewable sources, it is no (global) problem. In that case, you’ve just taken the sun’s energy from one place (solar panel, wind turbine, etc.) and moved it elsewhere (the ocean). That’s fine, that energy was going to end up heating the Earth in any case.
This is very different from greenhouse gas emissions, as those increase the total amount of energy the sun delivers to Earth, changing the global balance.
It would go into the water, and it would have basically no effect at all.
The amount of heat is many orders of magnitude too low to heat the oceans up.
As long as you don’t park in very shallow waters where it would have a local effect.Isn’t this the attitude that got us climate change in the first place?
True. But the scale is still a bit different:
Climate change added 400 ZJ of heat energy to the oceans so far.
If we piped the heat of all datacenters that currently exist into the oceans, that would add 0.001 ZJ per year.
The major issue (for global warming, not local warming) isn’t waste heat, it’s greenhouse gasses.Heating the oceans globally would require insane and totally unrealistic scale, but the effect on ecosystem on the immediate surroundings is a good question.
A single ship? Ye, no impact.
Thousands? Well, that will be very noticeable.
I’d probably be more concerned with them using bunker b or c for power generation.
Came here for this comment. The image is suspiciously free of smokestacks.
But still less than just letting it sit on a shoreline.
Except if you want to be in international waters, far away from pesky laws an stuff.
