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After Texas’ blue wave, what happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX? “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now.” (arstechnica.com)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 16 points 4 days ago* (17 children)

A data center in international waters is immensely more practical in most regards, if legal jurisdiction is your complaint.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (16 children)

    Great idea. And for each data center ship you can have a desalination ship for the cooling water. And both will burn bunker fuel, of course.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (15 children)

    Would the water need to be desalinated if it’s only going to be cooling the equipment?

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  • [–] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (14 children)

    If you want the cooling system to survive, yes.

    Ocean water is atrociously corrosive, prone to clogging tubes and short circuits much more easily than distilled water.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (11 children)

    Exactly. You could of course construct a ship with a closed inner cooling cycle that then dumps the heat to the outside ocean through cooling fins or the like. But that would require developing new technology and building new ships. That would take time and cost money. We can't possibly do that because line must go up now!

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  • [–] 5 points 4 days ago (9 children)

    This isn't a new idea. This is a problem that every nuclear sub deals with. From what I can gather, fresh water runs inside the reactor in two separate zones, and after powering the steam turbine goes into the condenser which is cooled by seawater.

    However it works, this problem has been solved for decades.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago (7 children)

    I'm not saying it's impossible or even difficult. But the fact is that currently no ships exist that implement this on the necessary scale. You don't just build a completely new type of ship in an afternoon.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (6 children)

    developing new technology

    This isn't as hard as you want to believe, nor would it require a brand new ship. If you want to do coastal designs, there are already some in place. If you want data sovereignty, the only real benefit of space data centers, a small cargo vessel with container data centers and one or more onboard generators could do this. Fueling it would be a challenge, but no more than all the issues with a space data center. As for time constraints, this would still be faster to deploy than any space-based solution.

    None of this makes it a good idea, just not particularly novel, difficult, or time-consuming.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (5 children)

    How are you going to cool these containers? That's the whole point of this post.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago (4 children)

    The design for coastal barges would work as well in deeper ocean, and the containers already have cooling systems in place. As I said, the only legitimate reason for deep ocean or space data centers is data sovereignty. The rest is just excuses or harder than the existing options. Which is why no one else is doing it and the reason Elon would.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 hours ago* (1 child)

    The point of placing a container data center cooled with sea water at the shore is that, they are still readily available for maintenance. In the deep ocean, maintenance becomes a headache. Either someone lives there and does the maintenance. Or you fly people there regularly to do the maintenance. Like how they do it with ocean platform oil rigs. Cooling with seawater requires more maintenance, descaling, valve replacements, animal growth removal, divers, helicopters, camera drones, etc. Oil rigs can justify the cost with the extremely high profit margins that oil generates. I don't think data centers can justify such a expense. Specially now the bubble is starting to deflate and trillions of dollars have already been drained.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 hours ago

    Well, you can reduce maintenance issues with the cooling system by using radiators and minimizing the amount of parts and eliminating the amount of moving parts altogether that have to be in direct contact with seawater. As I said above, I think the only benefit doing this has over the many others ways we can design data centers is data sovereignty, which isn't a good reason imo. My whole point in this thread was that there was no new technology or major development to make this happen.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    Exactly. Cooling a maritime vessel is easy, because the ocean is a giant heatsink. The heat capacity of water is so far above almost any other common material, and water is plentiful in the ocean.

    Put the fresh water in a closed loop and let salt water carry the heat away from some kind of heat exchanger.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    Not new technology, this is how the water heater on my boat works. Closed loop cycle that dumps engine heat into the hot water tank. There's also a secondary inline heater I can turn on for when I'm entirely on sails.

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