Data centers such as those used for training and AI models have a tendency to drain local water for the purpose of heat exchange. hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot hot They also suck up so much energy that they wake up, and it turns out we may be paying for it with higher bills.
Maybe the solution is right under our noses: Put data centers in the sea, and power them with wind.
In the special area of Shanghai Lin-Gang, a new project worth approximately $ 226 million has proven that such a project can enter the first phase of construction. In a sense, this will be a kind of free lunch for computing when it is completed: Water ceases to be a problem, as does the carbon of the carbon center. But is it actually a good idea?
Reports about this project have been published in several places, including Wire. The facility, Wired’s story notes, currently has a “total capacity of 24 Megawatts.” That’s like a typical center, according to a Pre-AI data center, according to a report by McKinsey, which notes that data centers “used tens of megawatts before 2020 in the coming years.
That story also notes that more than 95 percent of that facility “comes from offshore wind turbines,” so it sounds like the power comes from wind that was diverted from the inside, rather than installed at a wind generating station in the Data Center.
But since the cables also show in the story last year about a small, but similar, project in the US, this may not be a good idea. In part, it’s because when it sounds green, the heat exchange from all those GPUs is at least to some degree the temperature of the sea – one of the main things that surprise.
The founders of a start-up called Nothingopean say that they “minimized a small capsule full of GPU servers in San Francisco Bay,” without obtaining, any permissions obtained, any permissions obtained and Rece Rogers Note. Dave and Roger sought comments from many scientists, learning that even small temperature changes in the lake “can cause algae blooms and harm wildlife.” And a data center doesn’t have to be huge to cause problems. “Any increase” in temperature is a potential problem, because ‘it can introduce harmful algae and attract invasive species.’
The 2022 paper on underwater data centers also hypothesized that unexpected events such as Ocean Heatwaves in the vicinity of data centers will lead to animals with oxygen.
In a healthy story for Nongopera, the fear of going back ended up driving the company to look at other laws beyond the US, although it says it still wants to work in the San Francisco Bay. Nemoinean might be a great company, and I have no choice in any way. I bring it as a reminder of a truism: here in the US, big, tech ideas are sometimes met with regulatory pushback – and sometimes it’s because of what’s wrong with the real need.
In contrast, the Chinese project appears to have followed local regulators, according to a piece of American science on the underwater data center. The project received an evaluation from the China Academy of Information Academy of Information and Communications, which is under the aegis of the Chinese government ministry.
But China has an ambitious drive to harness the power of its data centers. According to one report, the Power Consumption (Pue) performance of data centers around the world has fallen by about 1.56 on average and is essentially a plateau. A press release on the Chinese government website last year said that by the end of 2025, China will drive its average down to 1.5.
It would be an understatement to say that China and the US are different business and regulatory environments. But the ocean is a vast interconnected resource that we all share. More data centers are about to be built. Here’s to hoping that sending them to meet their environmental goals is something that happens, when It turns out to be a good idea.
