A 24-megawatt Chinese data center is a pilot project for a wind-powered underwater AI infrastructure using the sea as a heatsink
Posted by nohup_me@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 78 comments
ConditionTall1719@reddit
I don't know why they need more than a swimming pool inside a closed loop system which then just has free running river in it
arkuto@reddit
Because that swimming pool would heat up.
chedder@reddit
likely because its a publicity stunt since microsoft did the same thing a few months ago. realistically though, using the ocean is much more scalable, I just didn't think you'd have to be an expert diver to be a network engineer in the future.
Direct_Witness1248@reddit
Pretty sure theres been feasibility studies of undersea DCs going for many years, but the corrosion was too hard to deal with last I heard. Maybe there's better materials now.
chedder@reddit
well what microsoft did was entirely encapsulate the thing in a shell, I would imagine the point of failure would be where the connections are made.
Zarmazarma@reddit
It's just... hard to imagine that this is some how more economical than pumping water and running it in a loop, but... I guess I'll trust people with more specific degrees to do the math on that.
chedder@reddit
its way more efficient, pumping water around takes electricity that water has to be pumped through massive radiators to cool it back down, 40% of the total power in a datacenter is spent cooling. the ocean is a giant thermal sink so you never have to cool the water down.
nhluhr@reddit
If 40% of the power is spent on cooling that means a PUE of around 1.6. Rhat's pretty bad and countless data centers are comfortably below that, some even at the 1.1 level.
JesusIsMyLord666@reddit
You could build a datacenter close to lake and cool the loop down with a heat exchanger against the lake water. That’s how things nuclear power plants are cooled for example.
Microsoft’s underwater datacenter still had watercooling to move the heat from the components to the sea.
Jiopaba@reddit
It'd have to be a big lake for the economic impacts to not be bad. Even heating the water a few degrees can be detrimental to the wildlife, both plant and animal.
zdy132@reddit
You must mean the environmental impact. The idea of outputting megawatts of heat into the ocean does sound very bad for everything living inside it, at least near the site of the servers.
Hopefully I am just overestimating the power and underestimating the size of ocean.
chedder@reddit
the ocean is very big, it can handle it.
zdy132@reddit
While I want to agree with you, this idea is exactly why we are where we are now.
Would your sentence be the same as saying the atmosphere is very big, and it can handle some greenhouse gas?
chedder@reddit
brother, do you have any idea how much energy it would take to heat the ocean 1 degree. even if all of humanity tripled our energy output we wouldn't come close.
ImViTo@reddit
Linus recently toured one that has plan for that
Hegemonikon138@reddit
One of the major datacenters in Toronto does this. It's downtown and pulls the cold water from the bottom of lake ontario.
zipzoomramblafloon@reddit
Yes, it's working so well at scale as a global carbon sink
ha ha oh wait.
einmaldrin_alleshin@reddit
Using ocean water has the advantage that you have a practically infinite supply of coolant at a reliably low temperature. That makes it very efficient, while also giving it a small environmental impact as it's neither using fresh water, nor disrupting coastline ecosystems.
No_Sheepherder_1855@reddit
Because data centers don't use closed loop systems.
JesusIsMyLord666@reddit
Some do. Microsoft’s underwater datacenter would have had to use closed loop cooling to transfer the heat for the components to the sea.
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
Oh... Now we are going to drain the seas with this AI bullshit. Since this thing has been invented, there has been NOTHING good coming from it.
OH But wait a minute! Let's ruin this planet with it! It's the only thing this shit does right.
Humanity has reached the top level of stupidity... or a new low, whichever fits...
doscomputer@reddit
thats a microsoft problem specifically and I've seen many streamers do things thanks to vibe coding that otherwise they'd never have been able to do
meh, I used stable diffusion to make some cool wallpapers for my laptop, you can prompt for things that aren't real/possible like glowing paint and being underwater in a toxic waste dump. also I have seen some legit insanely realistic vids with the latest demo of sora 2
last two are valid but also not really where the hype and progress is, dumb uses of the tech don't invalidate when its actually useful.
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
Microsoft or not, it's AI coding, and it's failing. You may have tons of excuses, but at the end, the result is the same. Streamers use it? Good for them, we will soon see if it fails or not (Most likely it will, like it always do)
Stable Difussion is another failure. Prompting fantasy is nothing new or original, anyone can just create that. Again, unoriginal and looking closely, it will mosst likely have something off...
AI is nothing more than marketing from the rich and a tool to make this planet a wasteland. Hopefully, one day I will proven wrong, but I highly doubt that.
StickiStickman@reddit
This has to be one of the dumbest comments ever posted in this sub
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
Blah blah blah, it's dumb, blah blah I have no argument against this. Thank you for proving my point, AI Bro.
DirectorDry2534@reddit
AI, despite all this super annoying marketing shit it has going on, does have its use. It just was a mistake to give it to the masses, creating this excessive need of energy in the first place (though it is probably neccessary for training purposes). Just use it where it can actually and factually increase productivity. Everyone else who wants to ask their AI what they should have for dinner today need to pay premium for it.
Toojara@reddit
I think "giving" is a bit of a misrepresentation. Most of the problem are companies trying to push it into anything and everything even when it doesn't work at the most basic level. And most of the rest is from companies mass harvesting data for training.
That's what pretty much everyone wants but it's dotcom all over again.
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
Giving it to the mases? They charge for the features it uses... and honestly, it's not worth it. It doesn't even work for the mases... so, another point in that list.
AI has no uses other than global warming and destroying the planet, and it has been seen multiple times.
The sooner we accept this, the sooner we turn page and let this shit die and rot alone, with the stupid richies that promote it.
Little-Order-3142@reddit
but for a precious moment in history we created a lot of value for shareholders
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
Oh yes, that's right, silly me :V
BlueGoliath@reddit
Yeah but there's money to be made.
Dark_ShadowMD@reddit
I forgot we eat money, shit money, breath money, and all is made of money... My bad, poor companies :V
BlueGoliath@reddit
Line go up! Line go up!
ketamarine@reddit
Sometimes it feels like China is living in the future and the US is living in the past.
Maybe stop electing 80 year olds to run your country who's economic policies resemble bad 80' soap opera plots.
upbeatchief@reddit
Hey we already are causing the oceans to warm at a rapid pace. What's a few megawatts more going go do.
I am sure if this trend catches on and the 10 gigawatts of power needed for chatgpt is cooled by the Ocean nothing much will change.
( A gigawatt is about the power needed for a million individuals, chatgpt needs the power of a country with a population of 10 millions to power their data centers. Absolutely trashing the environment in the process)
jv9mmm@reddit
Good old climate fear mongering. A 10 GW datacenter would be a rounding error for a drop in a bucket. It would have no, measurable effect on the ocean as a whole.
sisiwuling@reddit
jv9mmm@reddit
So, let's work on this thing called reading comprehension. How about you read what I wrote and try one more time.
StickiStickman@reddit
Which is irrelevant to the comment?
jeffy303@reddit
Oceans are already absorbing something like 100 mil GW of solar heat. Anything that humans can build for the next century is a less than a rounding error in terms of heating up ocean directly. The only real thing we should be worrying about is limiting amount of gasses which trap the solar heat in the atmosphere and end up heating up the oceans more. So any alternative to gasses which trap solar radiation are almost by default a better solution.
upbeatchief@reddit
It does have an effect.
https://www.catf.us/resource/wounded-waters-the-hidden-side-of-power-plant-pollution/
"Alteration of water levels and flows in ways that can be damaging to plant and animal communities.
Discharge of water at temperatures as high as 60 degrees hotter than the water body from which it came – threatening aquatic ecosystems which cannot sustain such a temperature shock."
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/2657/1/020039/2831811/The-impact-of-waste-from-thermal-power-plants-on?redirectedFrom=fulltext
"thermal power plants pollute reservoirs by dumping warm water into them, as a result of which a chain reaction occurs, the reservoir becomes overgrown with algae, the oxygen balance is disturbed in it, which in turn threatens the lives of all its inhabitants"
It like in the 60s and 70s were they would say that dumping motor oil into a hole filled with gravel was a good idea.
Chain reaction from dumping hot water into oceans and rivers which promote algae taking over a local area is poorly understood.
Toojara@reddit
Thermal pollution is bad but given there are thousands of power plants putting 10-100x the heat into the water this doesn't seem like an immediate disaster in comparison.
The largest supercomputers eat up 30 MW, a small coal plant puts out about 150 MW of electricity which means \~300MW of leftover energy into cooling water. A large power installation is easily 10x that.
jeffy303@reddit
Yeah local ecosystem, if you are not careful about it. But that applies to literally anything that uses ocean water as resource. Like yeah if if the desalination plants is dumping salt right where it picked the water it can make the water in that spot slightly more salty, doesn't mean desalination plants are making oceans overall saltier that can be measured with anything less a than scientific tool that goes to 15 decimal places.
Niccin@reddit
I wonder how much the oceans were absorbing before we filled the atmosphere with carbon emissions. We might only be contributing a rounding error's worth of heat, but what if it only took a rounding error's worth of heat to get to where we are now?
I'm not implying that that's the case, I'm just considering the possibility and have no idea what the answer is.
Visible-Advice-5109@reddit
To be fair the direct warming caused by the heat generated by the datacenters us only like 1% of the warming caused by the greenhouses gasses released to power them.
StickiStickman@reddit
Only in the US at least, since Europe, Asia and China has much more green energy.
upbeatchief@reddit
The local effect of dumpling megawatts of power into the sea is not something i am looking forward to seeing.
If the gigawatts of heat produced by the new generation of data centers is going to follow this path. It will likely adversely effect the environment.
Visible-Advice-5109@reddit
I mean dumping gigawatts worth of energy into the sea is pretty normal. There's hundreds of power plants already doing that and a few that dump 10+ GW into the sea.
anival024@reddit
The sun irradiates the Earth with more energy than we could put out even if we intentionally detonated the world's nuclear arsenal and burned all fuel. And it does it non-stop. We're several orders of magnitude below being a K1 civilization.
Thermal "waste" is one of the least consequential things to worry about.
kuddlesworth9419@reddit
Most of that radiation doesn't actually get to us though. If it did we would be like Mars.
BlueGoliath@reddit
People not understanding the true environmental impact of these data centers is peak Reddit.
Spooky-Mulder@reddit
The ocean is very big
SoilMassive6850@reddit
Indeed, that's also why even the historical act of dumping radioactive waste in the sea had quite negligible effects. Turns out when you are contaminating a large volume instead of an area it's really hard (though floating crap is still contaminating an area, so trash dumping is highly ill advised. thank god car batteries sink.).
jtblue91@reddit
That's being a little insensitive
upbeatchief@reddit
For the few megawatts from one data center, sure. But I am not worried about the gigawatts that might be cooled by the Ocean.
It's not something that was done before. And i fear the effect it might have.
defensivedig0@reddit
Considering there's just.... So much water. And the specific heat of water is really quite high. You could use the ocean to cool the entire worlds electricity use for a year and it would warm an average of .00001 degrees or something absurd. The issue is local heating moreso than actually heating the ocean. We literally are not physically capable of that.
thunk_stuff@reddit
The sun dumps a million times the heat energy into the ocean compared to all the data centers in the world currently do. I imagine there could be disruption of local ecosystems though.
zenithtreader@reddit
While I agree that AI datacentres are a bang of humanity on the long run, 10 gigawatt is literally not going to do a thing. The total power Earth received from the Sun is around 170 petawatts, or about 10 thousand times more than humanity produces and uses, or 175 millions times more power than 10 gigawatts.
Ocean warming is caused by atmosphere warming, which in terms is caused by the green house trapping more heat from the Sun than normally should have been released or reflected back into space. The totality of energy movements causing the warming is a few orders of magnitude greater than we can produce, let along a single datacentres.
Also if these power comes from renewables then the net waste heat released will be zero anyway.
The much greater danger of AI is the way it is (and will be) destabilizing and unraveling human societies.
Exist50@reddit
As the article mentions, Microsoft conducted a similar trial a while back.
https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
It's certainly interesting as a concept, but the main hurdles seem to be serviceability and long term corrosion from sea water.
Side note, this was an interesting detail:
That's an interesting piece of legislation. Pleasantly surprised China's going for that regulatory approach. Though hopefully not too many side effects (e.g. water usage from evaporative cooling).
krystof24@reddit
They likely subsidize electricity so not wasting it on a huge scale is desirable
StickiStickman@reddit
... it also is without subsidizing anything?
shovelpile@reddit
China has huge dams and nuclear power plants built by the state, in some cases they overproduce relative to local demand. It then makes sense to attract datacenters to the area by giving them a good deal, as datacenters are a national priority for China.
When they make regulations for datacenters they then might as well make it apply in a way that make sense for both subsidized and un-subsidized electricity.
DerpSenpai@reddit
It would be better to build these in rivers but they might not be deep enough
booi@reddit
Rivers might not be reliable enough and the warm water might be somewhat detrimental…
mcribzyo@reddit
Great, let's warm the oceans faster.
bigvalen@reddit
Huh. Google's Hamina datacenter in Finland has been using sea cooling for at least 15 years. The water in the area around the DC is something like 0.25C warmer than the rest, no big deal. Though, they intentionally keep the cooling gradient low...so egress is ~25C or so...not super-hot, that would definitely cause problems for wildlife.
Seems that it's around 255MW, according to Google's LLM. And given it's powered in large part by renewables via PPA, seems the Chinese thing isn't breaking much ground.
JL3Eleven@reddit
Future Tofu Dreg project incoming LMAO.
xcubbinx@reddit
Can we use a lake or a hydro dam reservoir?
the_nin_collector@reddit
Why?
Heat dispersal isn't an issue with closed looped water system. The water works jist fine and then releases it into the air.
There are two other concerns before heat. #1 getting enough power.#2 density, not jist of the nodes but the actual hardware..closer it it together less copper is needed and it's easy to water cool.
Of all I have read, heat isnt an issue.
Slasher1738@reddit
Oh great. Even warmer oceans
anival024@reddit
The sun is hitting us with over 170 PW. You're worried about 24 MW, 10 orders of magnitude down the scale.
Slasher1738@reddit
All I'm saying is that we don't need to take a green source of energy and turn it into another warming source.
CheesyCaption@reddit
Literally anything that uses electricity eventually dumps that energy back into the environment as heat.
ConsistencyWelder@reddit
Great, but I'd rather see that excess heat be used for things like district heating. Sounds wasteful just to use it to precook fish.
ConsistencyWelder@reddit
Great, but everywhere else I'd expect that excess heat to be used for district heating. Sounds like a lot of wasted energy and some warm fishes.
wywywywy@reddit
Wouldn't it be better to make a "data center ship", and use the bottom of the hull (don't know what it's called) for cooling? Surely it's easier to make and service?
Or actually some sort of floating data center would be even better.
jenny_905@reddit
Every day we move closer to the Futurama vision of global warming.
Working_Sundae@reddit
Only 24 MW? Some are building multi GW data centers