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Your idea is what's being done at the largest computing center in Switzerland, the CSCS. They pump water from the relatively deep Lake Lugano [1]. Europe's currently fastest supercomputer (world No. 7) is hosted there.

[1] http://www.cscs.ch/cscs/an_innovative_centre/cooling_system/...

[2] http://www.top500.org/lists/2015/11/

Environmentally pumping heat into a river would not be though acceptable I would think, so the water source probably is the ocean, running pipe across beach front property might not be as doable.

> perform maintenance for 5 years would be more significant

They would be built like Google, you don't waste money doing maintenance.

I think the main issue is it's unusual and as such costs of complexity and legal come in.

I assume it is for space reasons. You could put down a data center in a harbor, for example. The amount of metal that would be required to scale this model to that size, however, seems excessive.