Honestly if they are going to build a datacenter anyway, this is my preferred way to go. Plenty of water for cooling, power is harder but not impossible.

Bears will eat the data centres, somehow

I’ve seen pictures of data centers with parking lots full of cars. Are they going to ferry people to and from work each shift?

We're sorry Mr Robertoe, the pirates, they stole your data. You should change your password right away!

Probably like an oil rig rotation. You live and work for a contracted period of time on the boat, then you cycle off with someone else every few months or so.

Poseidon plz 🥺

The real One Piece is the datacenters Samsung made along the way

Makes sense. Leaves our potable water alone and keeps the fuckers out of sight. They could even put in wind turbines to power the fucking things.

Im somewhat surprised nobody has mentioned how corrosive salt water is. This likely would have to be some platform like an oil rig with power and internet via cables. So why not buy Sealand and build it out? Still lots oft Saltwater in the Wind and offshore but no need to have it floating around in rough waters.

If the electricity comes from renewable sources, it is no (global) problem. In that case, you've just taken the sun's energy from one place (solar panel, wind turbine, etc.) and moved it elsewhere (the ocean). That's fine, that energy was going to end up heating the Earth in any case.

This is very different from greenhouse gas emissions, as those increase the total amount of energy the sun delivers to Earth, changing the global balance.

Ironic, considering AI is built on piracy

The warming of the water is likely an issue for marine life and ecosystems

Lots of wind on the sea

Cheaper to build and maintain probably. You can dock a ship for a while but you need to bring manpower to a platform

¿Por qué no los dos? You can excite the fascist libertarians and still get the attention of the people who blow their load the moment someone adds "AI" to a product.

The nation of Sealand cannot be bought!

You might call them Killer Whales.

Terrible article. Does not answer the "why" question. What is the advantage? All it says is that "Seasides can ease the pains of giant mainland AI date centers". Is it just skirting around taxes and rules, like a floating casino? The ship would have a shoreside power connection or power itself as well apparently. Would the ships generators be subject to the same emission requirements as shoreside plants?

Seems like just a floating barge that will not really be out at sea, just sitting in protected bays or up waterways. Cooling water, would have to use a closed circuit freshwater system with heat exchangers cooling it with saltwater. That would consume less water than the evaporation cooling method, but still is not listed a possible reason.

Ships are expensive. What is the reason for floating a data center? Cheaper than land near big cities? Less regulations? Less taxes? Cooling water? Cheaper electricity?

That makes sense, but it’s also incredibly unappealing.

because the ocean warming and inevitable collapse of the gulf stream wasnt happening fast enough, apparently.

I’ll take some cpus and a few gpus.
And 1tb for ram.
What do you mean 200$ for 1tb of ram??
The last pirate said 100$!

Oh, so Google, the largest and most used website of all time?

Killer Luigi?

Wait, isn’t this what happened in Snowcrash?

I always kinda wondered how biblical ocean boiling would come about.

What a beautiful coincidence.

I am building ethically sourced, renewable, solar powered torpedoes, and I will not be seeking regulatory approval.

Yeah, but imagine if the ai results were all you got instead of those in addition to search results.

And less tax and worker protection laws in international waters.

Some large companies have been experimenting with underwater data centres for years. i remember reading about a microsoft one like 10 years ago.

The ark had all the hardware, a pair of each. Switches, routers, firewalls, ...

Heating up random parts of the ocean, can only good happen!

It's slightly less stupid than data centers in space I suppose. But I still find it pretty weird.

You will have to be tethered to land anyway. Properly high bandwidth networking as you would usually see to connect a data center (on the order of a dozen terabits per second) only exists through fiber optic cables. I'm sure of this point, because optical networking is my day-job, though we only run 400 Gbit/s links on the fastest edges since we're a small national network.

As for power, well there are 80 MW ship engines (e.g. Wärtsilä-Sulzer RT-flex96C, which has even been built in Korea under license before), so it's not impossible I suppose. But if you are tethered, then the country you're tethered to will probably forbid you from burning bunker fuel for 80 MW on its coast. At which point you'd be reduced to running clean diesel or something. That I expect would make the power more costly than just tethering to an electric grid

So now we have a big barge rather than a ship. What do you really save then? I guess the price of the land? And you gain access to copious amounts of saltwater, so you can do closed loop cooling with freshwater, and do the secondary heat exchange to the ocean. But you could do that by building on the coast too. Okay I guess you might gain tsunami security over a coastal building.

If this is a real proposal why don't they tell us the material advantages they expect, rather than making us guess?

Sovereignty.

Country gets a new hostile government or prsident? Guess we'll just sail our datacenters somewhere else

But still less than just letting it sit on a shoreline.

Except if you want to be in international waters, far away from pesky laws an stuff.

Yeah but those were not on ships.

They're doing it to grab the headlines away from Solar Roadways!!

Ding Ding! We have a winner!

People on oil rigs aren't necessarily the most skilled in their field. They still make well above median income because they put up with shit like this. Im sure something similar would develop. Would you sign up for a 12 week contract if it paid $60k?

The amount of heat is going to be negligible for the ocean, especially compared to a permanent structure pumping heat into the ground or a neighborhood. I'm more worried about how they're powering the things. Probably some fossil fuel.

Insurance scuttles, here we come

A twisted pair

Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean. These center produce large amounts of heat. Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean.

Once we open this box, tons of companies will follow.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-centers-temperature-spikes

Data centers arent big on the job creation front to begin with. Once they are built its basically a security guy for show, and a tech that flies in once a fortnight to deal with the odd, occasional issue.

a floating datacenter would probably have even less jobs, since they probably wont need the security guard to keep the punk kids away anymore.

The water is being warmed by burning hydrocarbons which emit massive quantities of CO and CO2 which in turn hold in the sun's heat which in turn causes the oceans to heat up dangerously. Not to mention CO2 is an acidic gas which wreaks havoc on marine life and land life.

The amount of heat instilled in the oceans from this type operation is negligible.

Reasonability of the solution aside, Samsung is uniquely positioned to propose such project as one of the largest electronics manufacturer and shipmaker in the world.

Yupp, I've heard that the sea need more help heating up....

I'm more worried about the sound pollution. Sound travels so much farther underwater and things like sonar are god awful for marine life. I can only noise reduction will not be prioritized when building these things quickly.

JK but the oceans aren't really warming up fast enough. Maybe a buttload of gpus may help?

There have been and are hundreds of thousands of natural underwater volcanoes that create heat far surpassing data centers....

Based on that I would like to know why you think data center heat would have an effect noticeable past those volcanoes.

Yeah I disagree with this sentiment, "things are already bad so this new level of bad is negligible"

Yeah sure a single instance but how quickly will it ramp up? What are the local consequences of it? See UV suncream bleaching the barrier reef for examples on how we can destroy nature simply by being present in it.

You are excusing something that is not necessary, to the detriment of habitats, biomes and ourselves.