Underwater Data Centers

Okay, there are these environmental and economic and technology factors and debates, but what I want to know is, is there any cool looking concept art yet?
 
"I have an adorable niece who can do some wonderful, playful freehand drawings for him" - Richard Aboulafia
 
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Got that one randomly recommended to me:

View: https://youtu.be/gc5XZJfF0kQ?si=sscygoDJGp7D73gO


Which made me think that cooling cycles in submerged facilities would not only pump massive amounts of heat into the oceans, but furthermore the noise levels would probably have severe negative effects on aquatic live. Impacting stress levels and breeding behavior, which has further consequences across the entire good chain.

More and the more it seems like the best solution isn't to put them in space or underwater, rather to not built data centers at all :)

(Or put them in the direct neighborhood of the influential folks in Silicon Valley and Washington, for our American friends).
 
EmoBirb said:
Which made me think that cooling cycles in submerged facilities would not only pump massive amounts of heat into the oceans, but furthermore the noise levels would probably have severe negative effects on aquatic live. Impacting stress levels and breeding behavior, which has further consequences across the entire good chain
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This is meaningless fearmongering without numbers, specifics, and possible mitigations.
EmoBirb said:
More and the more it seems like the best solution isn't to put them in space or underwater, rather to not built data centers at all :)
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I expect they will go in space, on land, and sea, because of their value to our lives, though the Chinese would certainly be delighted to see us hamper ourselves. They’re already funding campaigns to get us to stop or slow down construction:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...ons-to-stop-ai-data-centers-in-us/ar-AA24Mrp0

As they will be built, I think a more valuable question is: what do we do to maximize their benefit for society? I will keep repeating it: much of your life depends on their existence. The financial system, storing the photos of your cat, streaming music or movies, major websites where you shop, and much more, are dependent on their existence.
EmoBirb said:
(Or put them in the direct neighborhood of the influential folks in Silicon Valley and Washington, for our American friends).
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Or we insist they be designed beautifully where possible instead of as boring boxes (for example), and people are educated that the impact on water and energy use varies but is usually minimal. Yes, I know people will find examples of impacts. They do exist. They are not universal. We can argue for positive-sum solutions, or we can be unhappy they exist and argue against them because we don’t care what happens to the economy, without which the resources to pay for environmental cleanup will not exist.
 
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BlueAbyssal said:
This is meaningless fearmongering without numbers, specifics, and possible mitigations.
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You do realize that soundwaves travel further in water, right? So the consequences of something that's a nuisance on land are more far reaching beneath the sea.

As for the rest, I don't know about you, but I lived the majority of my life fairly happy without all the "AI" data centers that are sprawling from the ground over the last few years, with virtual no benefit to the average person. Just wasting water for cooling, pumping out heat and creating noise. But yeah, ChatGPT giving you a cookie recipe is certainly the most urgent need of modern society.

I also don't know what kind of clean up you mean, you can't clean up heat and noise, even less so in water.

I also fail to see how the Chinese doing stupid shit at the detriment of their local residents and ecosystem somehow justifies this? When XJP jumps from a bridge, would you jump too, after all if the Chinese jump, so must everyone else. "It cannot be allowed that the bridge jumping gap grows!"
 
EmoBirb said:
I also fail to see how the Chinese doing stupid shit at the detriment of their local residents and ecosystem somehow justifies this?
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Pretty sure it is not just the Chinese doing this........................

Reggards,
 
EmoBirb said:
You do realize that soundwaves travel further in water, right? So the consequences of something that's a nuisance on land are more far reaching beneath the sea.
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Yes. And you're assuming that absolutely nothing can be done, there are no passive options, nothing. Panthalassa, which I posted about previously, circulates seawater through their server modules, and they use solid-state components, thus generating far less in vibrations and noise than one might expect.
EmoBirb said:
As for the rest, I don't know about you, but I lived the majority of my life fairly happy without all the "AI" data centers that are sprawling from the ground over the last few years, with virtual no benefit to the average person. Just wasting water for cooling, pumping out heat and creating noise. But yeah, ChatGPT giving you a cookie recipe is certainly the most urgent need of modern society.
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Fortunately, I'm not writing solely of AI data centers, and even with AI data centers, they're not 'wasting' water (virtually every single claim I have seen has been massively overblown, and not a single person who condemns data centers ever seems to care about the water used for golf courses, for growing almonds, or considers the possibility that we could generate unlimited fresh water if we chose to do it), and everything produces heat and generates noise to some degree. You have no use for LLMs. Great. They're here to stay, and being upset and mocking about it won't make them go away.
EmoBirb said:
I also don't know what kind of clean up you mean, you can't clean up heat and noise, even less so in water.
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Broaden your imagination a bit, and assume that there are multiple ways humanity impacts the environment that we can improve as we can afford it. Environmentalism is a luxury restricted to the wealthy.
EmoBirb said:
I also fail to see how the Chinese doing stupid shit at the detriment of their local residents and ecosystem somehow justifies this? When XJP jumps from a bridge, would you jump too, after all if the Chinese jump, so must everyone else. "It cannot be allowed that the bridge jumping gap grows!"
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Do you believe that wealth is a product of raw materials, rather than brains?
 
BlueAbyssal said:
Environmentalism is a luxury restricted to the wealthy.
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Then the wealthy should do something about it instead of sitting on their hands.
It is not a luxury.
This attitude will result in mankind living in an environment much more unfriendly than today's. In the short term - say centuries.
In the long term, millennia and more, If mankind destroys the environment mankind lives in, Earth will survive and bounce back. Mankind will be reduced - at best - or will cease to exist.

You may call me a pessimist.
Looking at it from a naturalist's viewpoint, I feel that would actually offer a fresh start. A pity no humans could be around as witnesses.
 
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Decommissioned deep mines, coal etc?
 
BlueAbyssal said:
Environmentalism is a luxury restricted to the wealthy.
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Technological civilization exists to have nice things like comfy environment, and people disliking it is a cost that needs to be considered.

Arjen said:
In the long term, millennia and more, If mankind destroys the environment mankind lives in, Earth will survive and bounce back. Mankind will be reduced - at best - or will cease to exist.
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The only way to survive to the heat death of the universe is to get off this rock.

And some people think the generation that gets off this rock have been born already, and it should be done sooner rather than latter.

If you follow some thinkers, the current era is actually a unique window to get it done quickly. In the medium term the demographics are unfavorable with wrong population structure and reproductive selection favoring anti-sci/tech demographics.

And then there are folks that read asimov where a major plot point was making earth uninhabitable to get human to expand out.....
 
shin_getter said:
Technological civilization exists to have nice things like comfy environment, and people disliking it is a cost that needs to be considered.
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I agree. But there are clearly people whose dislike for technology didn't come from a serious apprehension of the value of one technology or another, and many also seem completely disconnected from how civilization is built and maintained, and how much energy, brains, and information that takes. Anyone who wishes to stay in the proverbial Shire should be able to do so. My problem is when they think everything should be the Shire.
 
BlueAbyssal said:
not a single person who condemns data centers ever seems to care about the water used for golf courses, for growing almonds
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Goodness.
BlueAbyssal said:
there are clearly people whose dislike for technology didn't come from a serious apprehension of the value of one technology or another, and many also seem completely disconnected from how civilization is built and maintained, and how much energy, brains, and information that takes. Anyone who wishes to stay in the proverbial Shire should be able to do so. My problem is when they think everything should be the Shire.
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It is gratifying to find out there are people about better able to determine what I think than I am myself.
 
shin_getter said:
Summon the AI god and beat death
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A good number of these people believe that unless you help build the AI god in the future a simulation or multiple simulations of you so perfect as to be 'you' will be endlessly be tortured by it (hence why you should help build it, because 'you' will be endlessly tortured).
 
Arjen said:
Which percentage will be able to resettle this century? What will happen to the Earth-bound in the meantime?
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It is data centers, not radiation enhanced bombs or something~ The adverse effects can only get so big before pushback/ai god summoned/bankruptcy from purchasing "geological" scale of compute (without trillions in returns, which is where the valuation is at).

Ultimately humanity lived through the ice ages with stone age technology, and some insane people even live in Canada.
 
shin_getter said:
Ultimately humanity lived through the ice ages
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Humanity nearly went extinct when its numbers had dropped to thousands. Not in an ice age, I admit. I still think underwater data centres are a bad idea.
New thread title?
 
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exclaimedleech8 said:
It makes dealing with waste heat much, much simpler.
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No, it just puts that heat into a place that isn't equipped to handle it. At all.


exclaimedleech8 said:
And no, it is highly unlikely that the heat produced will be enough to change the earth's climate.
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The Medieval Warm Period had more hurricanes and more damaging hurricanes than we have had since 1980. The surface temperature of the North Atlantic then was only 1degC higher than today.

And conversely, the during the Little Ice Age, the surface temp of the North Atlantic was only 1degC less than today.

In a complex system, it doesn't take much change in certain variables to have very outsized effects.
 
Scott Kenny said:
No, it just puts that heat into a place that isn't equipped to handle it. At all.



The Medieval Warm Period had more hurricanes and more damaging hurricanes than we have had since 1980. The surface temperature of the North Atlantic then was only 1degC higher than today.

And conversely, the during the Little Ice Age, the surface temp of the North Atlantic was only 1degC less than today.

In a complex system, it doesn't take much change in certain variables to have very outsized effects.
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I asked Gemini: here's what it said
The short answer is no, not globally—but it could cause some serious heartburn for local marine ecosystems.

While it sounds like a sci-fi villain's plot to boil the oceans, the sheer scale of the Earth's hydrosphere completely dwarfs the energy output of our data centers. However, the localized impacts are a different story.

Here is how the math and the environmental science break down.

1. The Global Scale: A Drop in the Bucket​

To understand why global climate change isn't the primary threat here, we have to look at the total energy involved.

  • Data Center Power: As of the mid-2020s, global data centers consume roughly 500 to 800 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year. Even if we project massive growth due to AI and assume all of that energy is converted into waste heat underwater, we are talking about roughly $3 \times 10^{18}$ joules of energy per year.
  • Ocean Heat Capacity: The oceans hold about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water. Because water has an incredibly high specific heat capacity, it takes an immense amount of energy to raise its temperature.
  • The Comparison: Greenhouse gases currently trap enough solar energy to add roughly $10$ to $15$ zettajoules ($10^{21}$ joules) of heat to the oceans every year.
The Verdict: The waste heat from all global data centers combined represents less than 0.03% of the heat the oceans are already absorbing due to atmospheric climate change. Globally, it's a rounding error.
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exclaimedleech8 said:
Most of the information they produce is correct
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The only one I've found tolerable is Leo, which at least provides linked citations back to where it found information. And even it gets way out of whack when it starts referencing wikipedia.

Tell that to the lawyers banned from courtrooms for 2 years because their legal briefs were written by AI. And were filled with non-existent case citations and legal code references.
 
Scott Kenny said:
The only one I've found tolerable is Leo, which at least provides linked citations back to where it found information. And even it gets way out of whack when it starts referencing wikipedia.

Tell that to the lawyers banned from courtrooms for 2 years because their legal briefs were written by AI. And were filled with non-existent case citations and legal code references.
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https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai
By 2030, data centers are projected to consume 980 terawatt hours of electricity per year. That's 3.5*10^18 joules.

https://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~sgs02rpa/latest/Holiday1409.html
It would take 5.5 * 10^24 joules to warm all the world's oceans by 1 degree celsius. So all the data centers being underwater would raise the temperature of the ocean by at most a millionth of a degree
 
It is not just the heat issues, what about contamination?

Yes, the seawater could cool the system, yet I am sure there would be some closed loop heat exchanger with some nasty chemicals.

You reap what you sow................

Regards,
 
Well, all the ships in the ocean, some must be packing chemicals and many have leaked.

All the industry by the rivers, some also leaked. Oh all the powerplants already built!

so and so on.

I guess one could say technological civilization is doomed~
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Though the only irreversible thing is entropy in a close system, and the universe is pretty big.
 
Yes. We have tens of thousands of ships plying the oceans, generating heat and noise, and yet the world has not ended (setting aside some things the Chinese are doing deliberately to sea life). Data centers, though the sea is a challenging environment for them, won’t boil the oceans and cause massive hurricanes.
 
I assume underwater data centers will be located in the shallows near the coast.
Those shallows are the place where most of the spawning grounds of marine life can be found.
Spilling heat in that environment is a singularly bad idea.
 
I've seen comparisons being made to marine traffic, or the impact of other industries on the general water cylce and marine ecosystem. The difference between ship commerce or fishing and something like data centers is that the first two are vital to humanity, being a source of trade and food. Thus they are necessary and their impact, albeit always assessed critically, is non-negotiable. The majority of data centers serve no meaningful purpose. Training yet another LLM of questionable usefulness is beyond stupidity. It's all things considered a huge grift, a pyramid scheme for tech giants worth billions. It's akin to building a shopping mall in bumfucknowhere, it's unnecessary, it's quite frankly a rather stupid undertaking and most importantly, it reeks of corruption and money laundering.
 
It’s not 2023 anymore, your personal feelings about AI don’t make it a grift. There’s also more uses for data centers than just AI, which I previously pointed out. Corruption and money laundering? Why be histrionic?
 
Indeed, it's not 2023, but 2026. And the same shit is still going on. If I were to introduce my personal views to this, I'd showcase far less good will and restraint. And as you may have noticed I said that the majority of data centers are grifting schemes riding the AI bubble. There are data centers which serve genuinely useful purposes, such centers have existed far longer than the AI hype though. That artificial hype meant to drive up market values in order to create a quick buck, the same hype that's responsible for a boom in data center construction when there wasn't one previously. Like all bubbles this one will implode too, it will be seen who'll be left holding the bag in the end.
 
Arjen said:
I assume underwater data centers will be located in the shallows near the coast.
Those shallows are the place where most of the spawning grounds of marine life can be found.
Spilling heat in that environment is a singularly bad idea.
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Depends on how you define ‘near.’ Panthalassa is putting theirs in the deep ocean. China is putting their pilot models about six miles offshore. Also, we can, have, and will create more opportunities for marine life (witness how environmental groups have fought to save offshore oil rigs because of the explosion of animal life around them). All we need is the imagination to try.
 

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Arjen said:
Spawning ground.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadden_Sea
A UNESCO biosphere reserve, so, thankfully, unlikely to be a site for data centres.
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Complain to the Chinese. They won’t listen to you though. Unsurprisingly you ignore Panthalassa operating in the deep ocean.
Arjen said:
How long will that take?
First, we take that away, and the promised new opportunities might well remain just promises.
Image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawning#Spawning_grounds
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Have you really never heard of old oil rigs becoming reefs? It’s been happening for some time: https://www.bsee.gov/what-we-do/environmental-compliance/environmental-programs/rigs-to-reefs

Also, the Wadden Sea has been heavily altered by humans, and yet it’s a haven for wildlife. There are plenty of other things we could do to help sea life while benefiting ourselves. Unfortunately they face significant obstacles from misanthropic types. No, I will not explain, as it would not be worth the time.
 
BlueAbyssal said:
Complain to the Chinese.
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OK ...
BlueAbyssal said:
They won’t listen to you though.
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... aww.
BlueAbyssal said:
misanthropic types
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Nice to be appreciated.
BlueAbyssal said:
Have you really never heard of old oil rigs becoming reefs?
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I have. North Sea wind farms and decommissioned oil rigs attracting marine life are well and good, but the Wadden Sea is nearly all national parks these days. For good reasons.
 
BlueAbyssal said:
This is meaningless fearmongering without numbers, specifics, and possible mitigations.

I expect they will go in space, on land, and sea, because of their value to our lives, though the Chinese would certainly be delighted to see us hamper ourselves. They’re already funding campaigns to get us to stop or slow down construction:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/mar...ons-to-stop-ai-data-centers-in-us/ar-AA24Mrp0

As they will be built, I think a more valuable question is: what do we do to maximize their benefit for society? I will keep repeating it: much of your life depends on their existence. The financial system, storing the photos of your cat, streaming music or movies, major websites where you shop, and much more, are dependent on their existence.

Or we insist they be designed beautifully where possible instead of as boring boxes (for example), and people are educated that the impact on water and energy use varies but is usually minimal. Yes, I know people will find examples of impacts. They do exist. They are not universal. We can argue for positive-sum solutions, or we can be unhappy they exist and argue against them because we don’t care what happens to the economy, without which the resources to pay for environmental cleanup will not exist.
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I truly would love for things to work out the way you project, but as ever capitalism is the current name of the game.
 
So, ai fans want to fan and logic be damned. Only thing I have learned from this thread.
After all, we have to find some way to deal with all the extra sea level rises and sea temp rises, why not just pollute it to hell and be done with it.
I get to wondering, just how many 'bots' are here on the forum, posting crap.
 
martinbayer said:
I truly would love for things to work out the way you project, but as ever capitalism is the current name of the game.
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Capitalism was the name of the game a century ago, too, and yet we built far more beautiful buildings in the past routinely than we do today.
 

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