this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Why would this be a bad thing? Doubt it happens at any scale but this seems like a perfectly viable way to cool data centers compared to how energy intensive they are today.
I imagine people are concerned about disposal and failures. They are unmaintainable ewaste containers
But without oxygen and with fewer vibrations from cooling, they last 5years longer with no maintenance.
Do you know what salt water does to literally almost any man made materials?
I'm sure the engineers who made this know. And if they didn't, this is an article from 2018, they would have most certainly found out by now.
Which makes you wonder why there's no update because this is something that we've known about for thousands of years and still need to constantly repaint boats because the ocean doesn't give a fuck.
Maybe they're able to use different materials? After all boats need to float so maybe they need to use lighter, less durable materials and have thinner walls
These things could be made as dense and thick as needed because they explicitly need not to float
My understanding is that they take a data center rack, stick it in a metal tube, then replace all the oxygen with an inert gas like argon, then sink to the bottom of the ocean. I think seawater is only exposed to the outside low tech metal.
Right but you've got to remember that these are off the shelf computers so they need cabling and wires, fans, all manner of drives that will fail, connections to the outside. Are they cooling the CPUs with saltwater or just the cooling equipment? Because either way is either risky via corrosion or just as inefficient, now with the added complication of having everything at the mercy of N, underwater.
Again, this whole thing just screams like greenwashing horseshit and the fact that there's been no update for half a decade leads me to believe that the project was a failure.
Ehh, it could sound that way (green washing). I remember an article from 1 or 2 years ago where Microsoft did a "pilot" test of this and the general consensus is that in a datacenter
Time (and investments) will tell if this is the solution to costly land based air heat pumps to cool datacenters with human interactions.