
Microsoft's underwater data centre resurfaces after two years - Qworg
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54146718
======
znpy
Interestingly in the original article it said that the datacenter was meant to
stay under water for five years. I wonder why they have pulled it out ahead of
time.

(source:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813)
\-- see video)

edit: just to be clear, my questioning isn't meant to be read in a denigratory
way. just wondering. Also thank to Kydlaw for pointing out that it actually
said "up to five years".

~~~
noisy_boy
Some executive probably said "I think it would be good to take stock of the
experiment now to reduce time-risk and arrive at a decision point regarding
future strategy".

~~~
badRNG
It increasingly seems that public businesses seem incapable of making long-
term plans, even rather trivial ones, if the cost of ending the experiment
results in immediate gains. The driving force is the single most important
metric: this quarter's upcoming earnings report. Businesses that tend to place
bets on multi-year investments are either privately held (e.g. SpaceX) or are
participating in specific public/private partnerships.

While I do think we are seeing the limits of what a publicly-traded company
can actually realize, there are of course counterexamples: Google always seems
to have multiple irons in the fire, and there are many other examples in the
comments on this discussion of corporate research labs:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24200764)

~~~
kortilla
> the cost of ending the experiment results in immediate gains.

This is oft-parroted without any hard evidence though. If it were true even
broadly, most companies would be doing absolutely no R&D because all R&D is
just cost in the near term.

~~~
Retric
Clearly companies can take on multi year projects like making a movie and even
take on risks when doing so. They also do a lot of things called R&D with
similar expectations of direct profits.

However, it’s not clear that Microsoft’s next version of windows for example
is actual research rather than the software equivalent of making a movie. As
such I think what people are talking about fundamental research not the kind
of R&D which happens to qualify for a tax break but is mostly just the cost of
doing business.

IMO, the line for what still qualifies for research is basically the DARPA
self driving car challenge. Before the event it looked like basic research,
afterward it looked like an engendering challenge to get there first. In 2004
nobody finished though several got close in 2005, in 2005 five teams finished
and the race for commercial success was on.

------
tyingq
_" The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to
the fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than
oxygen was pumped into the capsule."_

That does sound plausible. But I do wonder how much might have been due to
extra care. If I were the sysadmin on the project, I probably would have spent
extra time on component selection, cable seating, burn-in testing, etc. Lots
of pressure for it to do well.

Edit: Unrelated, but this picture is funny to me. I don't think there's enough
room to slide that server out, so I'm not sure what he's doing.
[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/...](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/48D6/production/_114364681_1033microsoft_3343.jpg)

~~~
perl4ever
This:

"there were no humans on board"

Made me think of this:

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The
man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from
touching the equipment."

~~~
Zenbit_UX
Is there more to that quote that makes it make sense? Otherwise both the human
and the dog are redundant as a pair as their purposes are circular and don't
benefit the factory.

~~~
pedrovhb
I've heard it before as "The dog is there to make sure no one touches the
equipment, and the man is there to feed the dog", may make a bit more sense.

------
scientific_ass
Microsoft patented the way to power these data centers using tidal energy in
ocean itself. They patented in 2017.

[http://www.whatafuture.com/microsoft-underwater-data-
centers...](http://www.whatafuture.com/microsoft-underwater-data-centers/)

~~~
lscotte
"All of Orkney's electricity comes from wind and solar power"

~~~
ehsankia
If they patented it in 2017, I'm guessing it probably didn't make it in to
this one, but the assumption is that the next version may have that
technology.

~~~
HenryBemis
That's a good enough reason to pull it out, replace/upgrade the equip, and
drop it back in with the new setup (new sources of energy), and if they get
the whole thing to transmit wireless-ly with a 1% failures per 2 years (8 out
of the 855 servers) then it's a truly set-and-forget thing. And they can be
bringing them up every 2-5-10 years to replace/upgrade the HW and drop it back
in.

~~~
eru
Microsoft probably has enough money that they could leave the original one in,
and pop down a new one with the new green energy.

(Of course, individual projects still have finite budgets.)

~~~
cutemonster
Building a new one would take more _time_

~~~
eru
Yes, but they can build multiple in parallel.

------
mips_avatar
It seems an additional hurdle is anti-fouling. Those barnacles and algae act
as an insulator, making the cold-water cooling advantage less and less of an
advantage.

~~~
endtime
If the surface were that hot, would sea creatures still want to live on it? I
have no idea what their range of tolerance is, but I'd assume that they're
well adapted for living on relatively cool rocks. And if it's not that hot,
then it seems like there's not a cooling problem.

(To be clear, I'm speculating without any real knowledge of this subject, and
welcome the inevitable corrections.)

~~~
Etheryte
The ocean is host to a very wide number of creatures and bacteria, some live
in arctic cold waters, others on volcanic vents, and every range in between.
There's a good saying for this, roughly translated, that nature doesn't love
an empty spot — if one type of plant or bacteria won't live in an area,
someone else will quickly settle in.

~~~
YawningAngel
We have "nature abhors a vacuum" in English

~~~
s_dev
I think these quotes are coming from either end of the spectrum of physics and
biology and don't necessarily say the same thing.

~~~
jakear
The beauty of the phrase is that it’s universal.

~~~
__MatrixMan__
Is it?

I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but so far it seems like
the vast majority of the universe is a vacuum--biologically speaking.

~~~
vlovich123
No one ever said the vacuum has to be filled biologically. The universe is a
vacuum but even there you get spontaneous virtual particles getting created
out of nothing as far as we know.

~~~
Filligree
Virtual particles aren't particles, and don't get created out of nothing.
They're a mathematical trick to simplify (read: make tractable) physics in a
particular formalism.

Apart from being drawn as particles on diagrams, they violate every rule of
what a particle is supposed to be.

There are formalisms where they aren't necessary, for example quantum lattice
models.

------
gregd
Does anyone know what the environmental ramifications are of sinking
presumably noisy and hot tubes into the ocean? I've been in server rooms and
they aren't exactly quiet. The picture of the racks look to me like standard
1U servers.

~~~
chmod775
Well, marine life is not going to give a damn about warm tubes. There's plenty
of natural heat sources in the ocean way more extreme than that.

As for the noise, that can have a negative impact, but it's going to be
nothing compared to the noise ships are making:
[https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/891854646/whales-get-a-
break-...](https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/891854646/whales-get-a-break-as-
pandemic-creates-quieter-oceans)

Whether it's high-pitched or low-pitched noise also makes a huge difference
underwater.

~~~
therealdrag0
Isn’t one of the environmentalist complaints against nuclear is they heat up
the water near shore, which changes the ecology?

One of these might not be a big deal, but a thousand? Worth questioning.

~~~
chmod775
>Isn’t one of the environmentalist complaints against nuclear is they heat up
the water near shore, which changes the ecology?

This is a valid point for small streams, whose ecology can't adapt when the
temperature changes mid-stream.

For oceans the picture is a bit different though.

Suppose we're looking at a cubic kilometer of seawater that has a temperature
of 10C. The entire _output_ of a nuclear power plant (single unit, about
1200MW) would heat that water by less than a single degree in a month.

The average power consumption (and thus roughly heat generated) of a single
server rack is somewhere around 12KW, so you can power about 100.000 of these
for that. Microsoft's submarine had only 12 racks. From this one could
conclude that even the localized effects are likely to be minimal.

Now for perspective: the entire ocean has a water volume of roughly 1.35
billion cubic kilometers. Next to major energy sources like the sun, and even
smaller ones like hydrothermal vents and streams of warmer water entering it,
your puny server submarine is not going to be noticed. With a nuclear power
plant worth of energy you're heating the whole body for just about
1/100.000.000th of a degree per year, assuming the heat wouldn't dissipate out
of the water at some point.

And really, if you're running your servers outside the water, the heat would
dissipate into the ocean at some point too, making it a moot point in the
grander scheme of things.

So the only area of interest concerning marine life is about 5 meters in every
direction from your server tube. I'm willing to bet it'll have _way_ less of
an impact than a warm freshwater river discharging into the ocean.

~~~
steev
But isn't the real issue how these small changes add up over time? Seems kind
of like saying "a single car will not put out enough CO2 to impact the
atmosphere" but here we are with millions (billions?) of cars that are
definitely having an impact on their environment. Granted, we will not have
millions of data centers but maybe we have enough that it makes a negative
impact. Certainly seems plausible.

I don't know anything about ecology, but my intuition is that all of these
things from wind turbines to data centers under water, have an impact on their
ecosystems. It wouldn't surprise me if we found out these had a negative (or
neutral) impact on their environments.

I guess my point is that it seems naive to simply hand-wave off the
possibility that these supposed environmentally friendly technologies actually
negatively impact their environment. Whether or not that negative impact is
less than the alternative is an interesting question.

------
benryon
Original Microsoft story: [https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-
stories/project-natick...](https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-
stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/)

------
mothsonasloth
I must ask, apart from the renewable energy factor, why do it in Orkney?

There are many islands and archipelagos in Scotland, the Hebrides which are
closer to the mainland but still out of the way of fishing.

Many of them are going to be setup with tidal and wind generators.

Would be interesting to see how it was tethered to the shore with networking
and power.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10megawa...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/mar/17/10megawatt-
tidal-power-station-approved-hebrides)

~~~
ashtonkem
Depending on the exact shape, sometimes dropping giant bits of steel in the
ocean can be very good for shipping; we purposefully sink ships that are EOL
for this exact purpose fairly often.

~~~
djsavvy
That's the first I've heard of something like this. What's the purpose of
dropping specifically-shaped steel into the ocean?

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
Oh, that's so that the drop-shippers can increase their throughput.

IIRC, it gives coral a place to grow.

------
geophertz
The thing is that if putting data centers underwater solves the cooling
problem, all the heat produced is wasted, so it this really a good solution?

~~~
crazygringo
Heat is awfully hard to transfer in the first place, especially when it's not
even that hot. It's handy if you can put your data center underneath a
swimming pool, for example. But I'm not aware of any large-scale heat recovery
projects from data centers. Data centers generally spend _extra_ energy to
remove the heat...

But honestly who cares if your power comes from renewables in the first place
-- solar and wind? It doesn't seem right to even frame it as "wasting" heat in
the first place, anymore than the sun's heat was being "wasted" warming up the
ocean in the first place.

~~~
jarvist
The new LUMI EU supercomputer in Finland will put its waste heat into a
district heating system: [https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/csc-lumi-
supercomputer-...](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/csc-lumi-
supercomputer-waste-heat-will-help-meet-district-heating-needs/)

I'm sure smaller scale data centre heat to district heating schemes must
already be in place. Fundamentally you are using the same technology to cool
the data centre (a heat pump), just pushing that heat into hot-water / steam,
rather than dumping into the air.

~~~
htgb
This has been active in Stockholm for years, at least:

[https://www.opendistrictheating.com/](https://www.opendistrictheating.com/)

------
angry_octet
Another example of the journalistic malpractice of not linking to the original
articles or data.

[https://natick.research.microsoft.com/](https://natick.research.microsoft.com/)

[https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-
natick...](https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-
underwater-datacenter/)

One of the facts left unmentioned is that this was built and operated by
Naval, the French state-owned submarine and shipbuilding corporation.

~~~
Kydlaw
I don't get your point? Why is it that relevant to you?

~~~
s_dev
It rewards originality over the long term rather than the fastest copy and
paster.

Sort of like how we try link to the original YouTube video.

~~~
bredren
Understanding what is OC is an increasingly important point for digital
content makers, from memes to ideas for explainer videos.

I think with actual articles written by presumed journalists, linking to
source data is what establishes the credibility of the author’s writing and
suggests they have read and understand the content.

Not linking to it doesn’t mean the author doesn’t understand it, but it may
mean their work does nothing more than regurgitate (adds nothing of value
apart from increased distribution)

------
spamizbad
Very interesting to see a lower failure rate. Is it simply a function of
possibly better thermals than your average datacenter? Less EMR?

~~~
mleonhard
Other explanations:

\- Technicians were extra careful (slow) when installing the equipment.

\- The datacenter pod used no recycled parts. Traditional datacenters are full
of recycled marginal-quality parts. Maintenance teams balance the cost of
buying new parts, the cost of testing used parts, and the labor & downtime
costs from recycled parts failing.

Extreme reliability is already achievable but not economical. One reason why
Google Search beats Bing is that Google's infrastructure software is more
tolerant of flaky hardware, so Google can spend less money on hardware
maintenance, reducing the cost per search.

Hopefully Microsoft will release a report and tell us the source of the
underwater datacenter pod's low failure rate.

------
wiredone
"We are hopeful that we can look at our findings and say maybe we don't need
to have quite as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability."

I was left wondering whether they were referring to the project, or just Azure
Availability in general. /s

------
akhilcacharya
Was the load in the data center synthetic, or did it handle production
traffic? Curious to see how they split it out.

I doubt there's a "Orkney-Underwater" region.

~~~
miyuru
The official site has the info you are looking for.

"Natick was used to perform COVID-19 research for Folding at Home and World
Community Grid."

Also the data center designation for it was "Northern Isles" (SSDC-002).

[https://natick.research.microsoft.com/](https://natick.research.microsoft.com/)

------
wrkronmiller
It would be nice to see some numbers on energy used to power this versus a
regular set of servers.

Also nice if they discussed the energy/cost involved with deploying and
retrieving these capsules and how well that would amortize if this became a
commercial solution.

~~~
zweifuss
From
[https://natick.research.microsoft.com/](https://natick.research.microsoft.com/)
Phase 1 demonstrated the feasibility of the subsea datacenter concept,
including our ability to remotely operate a Lights Out datacenter* for long
periods of time, operating with a highly efficient PUE (power usage
effectiveness is total power divided by server power; lower values are better,
1.0 is perfect) of 1.07, and using no water at all, for a perfect WUE (water
usage effectiveness is the liters consumed per megawatt of power per minute;
lower values are better, 0 is best) of exactly 0 vs land datacenters which
consume up to 4.8 liters of water per kilowatt-hour. For Phase 2, our goals
are to:

Develop one full scale prototype subsea datacenter, which could be used as a
modular building block to aggregate subsea datacenters of arbitrary size

Gain an understanding of the economics of undersea datacenter TCO (total cost
of ownership is the full lifetime cost of a datacenter including manufacture,
deployment, operations, and recovery) should we proceed to commercial
deployment.

------
jacquesm
Why heat the oceans indirectly when you can just place the heatsource directly
in them? Much less chance of losing precious ergs.

Seriously though, what is the direct ecological impact of doing this at scale,
would the local increase in temperature have an immediate effect on the life
around it? If so how much of an impact?

What about the effect on surface life and life in intermediary layers of the
water? After all, a body this size radiating 10's of KW of heat would cause
substantial convection. At data-centre scale could it conceivably shut-down
ocean currents or re-route them?

~~~
serjester
It takes about 80 watts to heat up a liter of water 1° celsius. Global data
centers used about 4.16 x 10^14 watts last year [1]. Let's assume we still
have a lot more data centers to build so bump that number up 10,000X. Assuming
every watt of energy is actually converted to heat and we moved every data
center on earth underwater it'd raise the temperate of the oceans (1.3x 10^21
liters) about 0.01°C.

This is a very rough calculation and there's obviously nuances but the point
is oceans are HUGE and water has a high specific heat. It's much easier to
indirectly heat them with greenhouses gases.

Edit: I clearly need to brush up on my physics. Regardless the effect is still
miniscule.

[1]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/15/wh...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/12/15/why-
energy-is-a-big-and-rapidly-growing-problem-for-data-centers/#529477415a30)

~~~
t0mbstone
You are making the assumption that moving data centers underwater would also
come along with a 10,000-fold increase in the number of data centers? That
seems like an unnecessarily hyperbolic approach.

That would mean going from 8.4 million data centers to 840 billion data
centers. I mean, come on...

But hey, let's roll with it. What would be the effect on the environment if we
literally had 10,000 times more data centers ABOVE ground, for comparison?
After all, you are neglecting to take into account the fact that a HUGE amount
of the wattage used by existing data centers has been cooling via HVAC, and by
switching to underwater cooling their overall watt usage would theoretically
drop a good bit due to the efficiency gains.

~~~
CDSlice
I think you are arguing for the same thing your parent comment is? That
comment is trying to show that even in the absolute worst case of no
efficiency gains and 10,000x increase in data centers the impact that using
the oceans to cool them would have on the ocean is absolutely minuscule.

------
sandworm101
Nobody talking about the potential military applications of a hardened
processing infrastructure underwater? Once upon a time Russia toyed with the
idea of putting ICBM silos at the bottom of lakes. Say you wanted to run a
network of hydrophones on the seafloor. You might want to do the data
processing in-situ rather than transmit everything back to shore. If I were
microsoft I might be interested in those potential contracts.

~~~
sangnoir
> Once upon a time Russia toyed with the idea of putting ICBM silos at the
> bottom of lakes

Was this before or after nuclear submarines were a thing? I think maintenance
is much easier with a submersible than something affixed to a lakebed.

~~~
sandworm101
During SSBN development. The test rigs for submarine missile are essentially
floating barges that are sunk beneath the water for testing. So someone
though, why not just have the barge sit on the bottom until needed? It can
then float to the surface to launch. That is cheaper than building a concrete
silo.

------
eklavyaa
They are only discussing about how they can make it more efficient. As far as
I understand one kind of cost cutting they are aiming is energy and money
required in "Cooling" systems, ya I read about less failure cases too. But
putting a heat generating device under water will have adverse effect on
underwater ecosystem surrounding it.

~~~
defnotashton2
The same is true of land based operations ha IMG environmental impact, there
is a whole lot more sea than land.

~~~
eklavyaa
are you trying to say we can afford to alter sea because its alot than land ?

------
sradman
> Microsoft’s Project Natick team deployed the Northern Isles datacenter 117
> feet deep to the seafloor in June 2018. For the next two years, team members
> tested and monitored the performance of the datacenter’s servers. [1]

[1]
[https://natick.research.microsoft.com/](https://natick.research.microsoft.com/)

------
kevin_thibedeau
These should be built into the outflow of hydro stations to counteract the
unnatural cooling of the downstream river water.

~~~
dathanb82
How do hydroelectric plants unnaturally cool water going through them?

~~~
isbjorn16
My reasoning would be that hydroelectric plants dam up the water and the water
at the lower levels of the reservoir is that which spins the turbines (and is
released). I would imagine the "original" depth of the water being discharged
has a non-trivial impact on downstream river temperatures - though I lack any
and all qualifications necessary to say this with any degree of certainty.

~~~
dathanb82
Huh. I couldn’t find anything about it one way or the other.

~~~
isbjorn16
Anecdotally, I know the water outflow from Lake Raystown in Pennsylvania
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raystown_Lake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raystown_Lake))
is SIGNIFICANTLY colder than the lake surface is. I spent a week in the summer
there one year and we spent a lot of time boating/swimming in the lake as well
as tubing down the river and the days we spent tubing were much warmer air
temperature but much colder water temperature.

Edit: I also couldn't find any hard numbers!

------
kzrdude
In the final product, you could build the data center underwater in-place, and
have the servers partially accessible - they only need to be connected to the
structure in one end, and can be surrounded by water on all other sides.
(Visual idea - the data center parts are like fingers on the main structure).

~~~
jacquesm
Any seal in that construct would be a single-point-of-failure for the whole,
not just one fraction.

~~~
datameta
I would imagine bulkheads can mitigate some unforeseen leak. They can also be
built in relatively shallow water without a substantial amount of water
pressure.

------
slrainka
If an underwater Datacenter is established in International waters, do any of
the data and privacy laws apply?

~~~
jarito
Yes. Many of the privacy and data protections are not based on where the data
is stored, but rather where the people who provided that data reside. For
example, GDPR (an EU regulation) applies to US companies with data in the US,
but only if the data they are storing belongs to EU customers.

------
justinclift
Hmmm, how does one go about "buying" pieces of underwater real estate just off
the coastline, in order to set up an underwater data center there?

Wonder if it's a "speak to the local council" thing, or more a "speak to the
local (?) maritime body"?

------
aussieguy1234
If this type of data center is built and the location is kept secret, could it
be protected in the event of nuclear war or some other catastrophe? So
whatever happens, the internet will keep running

~~~
sgarman
My first thought was to go after the weakest link, or the cables/connection in
this case.

------
StillBored
In none of the articles do I see the power consumption of the pod..

But it looks packed with a lot of servers, and the surface area is quite
minimal given there don't appear to be any cooling fins/etc.

So, that many servers are definitely many KW of power, and its all being
conducted away via what appears to be a fairly minimal surface area. So the
problem probably isn't the exterior so much as the interior which appears to
mostly be a air->paint interface.

So, whats the cooling mechanism here, or are the servers that low power?

~~~
maxerickson
There's probably an internal heat exchanger that they pump seawater through.
This article says they pump seawater through heat exchangers on each rack (and
presumably shows the piping):

[https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-
microsoft-...](https://news.microsoft.com/features/under-the-sea-microsoft-
tests-a-datacenter-thats-quick-to-deploy-could-provide-internet-connectivity-
for-years/)

~~~
msandford
Seems kind of strange to put the whole thing underwater if they're going to
pump seawater through internal heat exchangers. At that point there's not a
lot of difference between putting the "submarine" underwater and leaving it
out of -- but near to -- the water and pumping seawater through the same
exchangers. With the added benefit of people being able to access things if
something goes wrong.

~~~
maxerickson
Their public statements so far indicate that, on the prototype, essentially
nothing went wrong in a couple of years (a small number of board failures).

On the seafloor, they get constant low temperature water with ~0 external pipe
and no head to pump against, so it might not obviously be better to have
access.

~~~
remarkEon
What’s different about the hardware that they’re seeing failure rates that
low?

~~~
jalk
They speculate that the removed oxygen (replaced with nitrogen) and no humans
banging stuff (by accident I assume), plays a role

------
24gttghh
5 years planned with no maintenance (e.g. no storage disk failures to
replace). I wonder how many spare drives were slapped in that tube to make
that feasible?

~~~
maxander
I would bet they just used SSDs and made sure that the workload they were
giving these servers wouldn’t tend to hit the rewrite limit over that time
period. (Even then, I’d bet the expected writes-per-time was the source of the
“five year” figure.)

~~~
jandrese
Probably a decent number of warm spares in the mix as well.

~~~
24gttghh
Yeah. I can't see just using the MTBF for the drives and not having any
spares. Shit happens.

------
ryanmarsh
I wonder what the engineering tradeoffs are for building sealed/unserviceable
capsules vs. pumping cold seawater a few hundred meters to an on-shore DC?

It seems you're just replacing the air/refrigerant heat exchanger for an
air/water heat exchanger. Also, an onshore facility could be run in 100%
nitrogen as well without the difficulty of managing an artificial reef
connected to fiber and power.

------
ngcc_hk
The benefits is secure, nitrogen with renewable energy. it could be anywhere
not necessarily in the sea. It could be in a data center as well. A temper
proof ...

And one need to dig it out to check though meant it is not connected. Not very
useful. Even a mars based one we want them to communicate. Even low end just
control signal.

------
29athrowaway
It is undeniable that something fishy is going on down there.

------
jeffrallen
Right, just fine until there's a massive data leak and a slick of SSNs is
spreading towards the shore, and then what will the Greens say?

------
cmarschner
I wonder how you would deal with theft and espionage for an underwater data
center. The fact that no humans are around could be detrimental.

~~~
rhodo
it wouldn't be too hard I don't think. It's a sealed tube so any attempts to
get in could be detected with accelerometers or microphones.

~~~
swagasaurus-rex
Maybe easier to target the wires

------
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps they can be paired with seaweed farms to improve growth rate; feed the
seaweed to cattle to reduce methane.

------
sktrdie
Why not put them in... space?

Lots of energy (direct sun) and cold temperatures up there. I guess space
debris could be an issue.

~~~
thaumasiotes
As I understand it, the temperature is cold in space, but it's still difficult
to transfer heat from yourself to the environment (because there's nothing in
the environment to absorb the energy).

You don't want low temperatures for their own sake; you want them to
facilitate heat loss.

------
WalterBright
Putting data centers for lower latency needs in the arctic ought to do just
fine.

------
rk1987
Wonder if the data center was used for real world traffic?

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rozab
>The team is speculating that the greater reliability may be connected to the
fact that there were no humans on board, and that nitrogen rather than oxygen
was pumped into the capsule.

So, nothing to do with it being underwater?

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m1n1
Isn't digging easier than dealing with the ocean?

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thysultan
Running C at zero degree's C in the sea.

------
867-5309
they probably surfaced it to replace the Intel CPUs with NVIDIARM C/GPUs

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doctor_eval
Really gives a new meaning to the term “data lake”

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aaron695
For anyone with a brain this is a dumb idea.

And of course we get an unquestioning BBC article.

If you dump it in landfill or a random corn field this still holds

"We think it has to do with this nitrogen atmosphere that reduces corrosion
and is cool, and people not banging things around"

But it was underwater and that made it magical! Which I honestly think it did.
It's still a garbage practical idea though.

------
ramon
I don't like the idea since raising water temperatures affects life in the
ocean like coral reefs.

~~~
AlanSE
This has been covered again and again in other comments. Thermal power plants
dump heat into oceans today. The data center is much more efficient than a
counterpart on land.

Ocean life and coral reefs are in danger due to temperature rise as a part of
climate change. Energy efficiency helps reduce that temperature rise.

~~~
ramon
No, actually there has been already many studies that there's no turning back
on climate change. Even going all electric energy it's not going to do much
for climate change, there's no turning back on this aspect at all.

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
After reading GP's comment multiple times, I do not see any place where he
mentioned turning back climate change. So whether or not your comment is true,
it doesn't seem to contradict anything GP said.

If we wanted to accelerate climate change, we could obviously do so (as proven
in the last century). Meaning we have an impact on the acceleration of climate
change. Meaning we can make decisions to make that acceleration slower, rather
than faster.

~~~
ramon
[https://climate.nasa.gov/](https://climate.nasa.gov/)

~~~
buzzerbetrayed
Is there something on there that contradicts what I said? I'm not going to
scour the entire website to find whatever it is you're referring to when you
could just tell me (except you probably can't because I'm guessing it doesn't
exist.. hence your vagueness).

~~~
ramon
What is your objetive here in this forum? Is it to pick a fight?

