Happy cake day!
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)
Let's boil the ocean everyone.
This makes me wonder what is better - underwater DCs heating the oceans, or above water ones with all the pollution creating and water sucking cooling instead. Part of me thinks the underwater one might be better.
The issue with climate change was never with "heat production". It's always been the generation of heat trapping chemicals. The sun sends a stupid amount of energy our way. Generally the earth radiates almost the same amount back out into space, with a minor amount captured by various things, like photosynthesis.
Pollution alters that equation and causes more energy from the sun to get trapped in the atmosphere. That's the problem. We could never generate as much energy as the sun (even the tiny amount that hits the earth), but we can definitely alter the atmosphere to trap more and more of that heat.
Also, the ocean is a MASSIVE heat sink. I saw someone work out the calculations recently, I don't remember the numbers, but the conclusion was that we'd never measure a notable increase in ocean temps if we housed every datacentre in existence in the ocean. The sun hitting the ocean every day dumps more energy into the ocean directly than we'd ever be able to manage.
It all comes down to pollution.
If you take local temperatures of the ocean at different latitudes, they won't all be the mean temperature of the ocean. It isn't a single massive heat sink.
Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
That's true, but water is so much more effective at absorbing heat than air, the effect will be negligible. It takes about 4.2 megajoules to raise one cubic meter of water 1 degree C. That energy would raise over 3 cubic KILOMETERS of air 1 degree C.
Even putting data centers at the bottom of large lakes would be unlikely to have an effect. It will not be percetable in the ocean. Regarding temperature anyway, other factors are worth considering.
Instead of drilling into the core we're just going to get boiled alive. Pretty poetic for a garbage system like capalitism.
I wonder how many sq km of data centers it would take to increase the temp of the ocean by 1 degree.
This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don't think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.
So that's 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.
Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world's electricity consumption for 51 years you'd raise the oceans' temperature by 1°C.
Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you'd be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It'd take about 393 years of the world's data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.
Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.
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Lol just wait until someone needs to replace something
I hope it fucken sinks
Soma vibes intensify
1.15 PUE is considered normal for water cooled datacenters. 1.5 is for air cooling. It might be more tightly packed, or conservative to not very deep water temperatures.
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. )
:Yawn: Worlds first? Microsoft already did this.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
Good for you for reading the article!
How many AI datacenters will it take to boil the ocean?
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.
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.
If every data centre was passively cooled in the ocean it wouldn't change temps by even 0.01 degrees. The Sun blasts an entire half of the planet with an absurd amount of energy every day. Energy, which technically originated from the sun, is just converted and being utilized to do work.
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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China says
China, you have lied to me too many times.
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.
Finally we can ~~pirate~~ fish for real RAM!
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
Larger DCs don’t replace individual components, they wait until a percentage of servers on a rack have failed, then replace the rack or servers.
They will likely adopt this same model
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