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Who else foresees environmental problems with this later down the line? (news.microsoft.com)

submitted 11 months ago by flashgnash@lemm.ee to c/technology@beehaw.org

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Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems

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[-] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 4 points 11 months ago

So how do they deal with the salty ocean water corroding everything? I mean for cooling, they have to exchange heat with it somehow. Looking at pictures of wrecks, any kind of heat exchanger would likely rust or become covered in various lifeforms rather quickly.

[-] flashgnash@lemm.ee 2 points 11 months ago

I would imagine they can get away with using much heavier, stronger and thicker materials as these things have zero requirement for buoyancy or portability (besides getting them there in the first place)

Not sure how they'd prevent it from being covered in algae and they even mentioned that they noticed sealife was using it as a home

I reckon it'd be a combination of using the hull itsself as a giant heat sync and the fact they can get some pretty ridiculous cooling from the ocean to compensate for some inefficiency with heat transfer

Just my guess though