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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Article says closed loop cooling so I imagine it’s just a big scale version of pc cooling but the radiators vent outside. But I wonder if you could pump sea water in to a datacenter and cool using an open loop. Perhaps salt and dirt would become too much of a problem.

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In Denmark it's used to warm nearby homes.

The heat is valuable and literally throwing it into the sea seems like a big waste.

Very geography dependent, but e.g. in the Nordics waste heat is a resource. This is why we burn our combustible trash instead of putting it in landfills.

Unfortunately, for most of the year the same wouldn’t we viable in California, and I guess the investment costs make the whole thing unprofitable.

Have a look at Microsoft's Project Natick [1]

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

Google Hamina datacenter uses sea water to cool.

I doubt they directly circulate it to the loops, perhaps some heat exchanger thing is more likely.

Here’s an article [1] from last year about the transition of Google’s NL datacenter to use surface water to cool their servers.

It mentions the DC uses both open and closed loop cooling, and you can see a picture of the heat exchanger, so it seems you are correct (at least for this DC).

[1] https://www.dutchwatersector.com/news/google-nl-switches-to-...

I really hope we end up with a low-grade widespread heat net (say 30 degrees celsius) using this kind of waste-heat, combined with heat-pumps to actually bring hot enough temperatures.

Maybe you could use sea water to cool a coolant?

That’s how it is done in, for example, boats as well as other places where you want to extract heat to a lake or to a sea.

You have your typical nice and clean coolant circuit that circulates through the engine, and then through a heat exchanger, you give that heat out to the sea water. This way the heat exchanger becomes somewhat sacrificial and you replace only that if it gets destroyed. And you don’t have to harden every single surface for sea water and all the creatures that come with it.

Boat engines with direct seawater cooling are definitely a thing. Usually only on the cheapest and nastiest engines, better ones definitely have a separate heat exchanger.

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