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Comment by moontear | Hacker News Reader

The experiment may have been successful, but if it was why don't we see underwater datacenters everywhere? It probably is a similar reason why we won't see space datacenters in the near future either.

Space has solar energy going for itself. With underwater you don't need to lug a 1420 ton rocket with a datacenter payload to space.

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Salt water absolutely murders things, combined with constant movement almost anything will be torn apart in very little time. It's an extremely harsh environment compared to space, which is not anything. If you can get past the solar extremes without earths shield, it's almost perfect for computers. A vacuum, energy source available 24/7 at unlimited capacity, no dust, etc.

The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit

Also solar wind, cosmic rays etc. We don't have perfect shielding for that yet. Cooling would be tricky and has to be completely radiative which is very slow in space. Vacuum is a perfect insulator after all, look how thermos work.

I can't see any reason to put them underwater rather than in a field somewhere. I think the space rationale is you may run out of fields.

Placing them underwater means you get free, unlimited cooling.

Exactly the opposite of space, where all cooling must happen through radiation, which is expensive/inefficient

It's not free cooling underwater, you still have to circulate the water and seal the components.

Makes far more sense to build on the beach than underwater, if all you want is unlimited sea water to pump around.

I understood that part of Microsoft's experiment was to see how being hermetically sealed would affect hardware durability. Submerging is a good way to demonstrate the seal, but that part might have been just showmanship.

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