China Is Putting Data Centers in the Ocean to Keep Them Cool

scientificamerican.com

8 pointsnoleary5 comments

YC-backed effort to do the same: https://www.networkocean.io/

Its a pretty neat idea. Microsoft did that (is doing?) a while back, but I question the practicality. If there is a hardware failure, swapping it out is going to be much more expensive if it requires a ship.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

Failed hardware is not expected to be replaced

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-confirms-the...

"In 2018, it deployed [the underwater datacenter] off the coast of Scotland, submerging 855 servers and leaving them underwater for just over two years. In that time, only six underwater servers became inoperable, compared with eight of the 135 servers left to run on dry land. That's a 0.7% subsea loss compared with a 5.9% loss on land."

The way I interpret that statement, it suggests they need to improve their dry land environmental conditions, not put data centers in the ocean and then not fix machines.

> Microsoft did that (is doing?) a while back

Not anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609305

Reply on news.ycombinator.com