Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success

Underwater pods can reduce latency by moving cloud services closer to customers.

Read the whole story

 

[gmerrick]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

The power would be the only issue. 120 feet of water is one hell of an EMF attenuator. It takes about 5cm of water to halve the intensity of gamma rays below 200 keV.

For reference, 120 feet of water is roughly equivalent to six to twelve feet of solid lead as a radiation shield...

Knowing almost nothing about EMF/EMPs, does the big power cable going to it (say, a hypothetical shore power cable to go with your hypothetical EMP) make any difference to that?

yep those power lines going into that container were hefty. that would likely be the weak point.

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

 

[Frennzy]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

It's a water-tight metal pod, with only cable passthroughs. That is *inherently* EM resistant. Just like an anechoic chamber for EMC testing. Line filtering is pretty well known. It's not perfect, but if you install that on the outside of the pod at the bulkhead passthrough, then it is easily replaceable. Data pathing would be fiber to begin with, so of no concern with respect to EM.

 

[PandaWear]

I think that I've been watching too much Alias recently, but I'm just imagining a server heist with a sub or largish boat.

 

[Boskone]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

Sure, but you could probably handle your entirety of physical security with a simple diaphragm pressure switch.

If there's a sudden change in pressure, turn off the pod. Either someone's breached it and you want the pod offline, or it's been accidentally breached and is flooding. At the scale MS (Google, Apple, etc) run, powering off a few hundred servers by accident for a few minutes probably wouldn't even be worth noting.

 

[afidel]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Extremely LOW frequency radio. 3-30kHz, and even then they have to come close enough to the surface to receive them (tens of meters). For deeper operation they can send up a buoy with a cable up to a few km long, but that of course is not the stealthiest thing in the world to do.

 

[QuantifiableQuoll]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

I think you're talking about ELF, not VLF.

 

[afidel]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

I think you're talking about ELF, not VLF.

Nope, submarine VLF radio system is in fact 3-30kHz and 300 baud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communica ... _frequency

 

[smyrgl]

I’m surprised no one mentioned one of the more obvious advantages that probably helped with the reliability side—that water provides an excellent radiation shield from any ionizing radiation that gets through the atmosphere.

 

[Jim Salter]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

Isn't a metal cylinder basically a Faraday Cage? Also, isn't 20+ feet of water an excellent shield from radiation of all types? I remember reading the submarines have special very low bandwidth, extremely low frequency radios, because that's all that they can get to really penetrate the ocean (they also, if I understand right have more normal radios, but I think have to basically surface or get to shallow depths of water, to use them).

Underwater RF comms are effectively nonexistent from a modern point of view. You have to specially deploy a REALLY FREAKING LONG cable antenna attached to a buoy that gets it within a few meters of the surface, after which you get potentially about enough bandwidth and throughput to receive data in Morse Code.

Theoretically, you could hit 300bps on VLF; to the best of my knowledge, actual comms are at only 50 baud—half the speed of acoustically coupled dial-up modems I used as a kid in the 70s and early 80s.

I think you're talking about ELF, not VLF.

No, that's standard VLF. ELF is way, way, WAY worse; it requires Shannon-Reed error correction and results in something like 5 bits per second effective throughput, and needs, IIRC, literal miles of shore-based antenna array for transmission.

 

[williamyf]

¿Is this Ben Cutler somehow related to David Cutler (of VMS and Windows NT fame)?

 

[LesDawg]

With enough data centres like these, all the excess heat will go straight into the sea, further contributing to climate change. The only place these data centres wouldn’t contribute further to climate change is if they were buried deep down in earth’s crust but then cooling would be an issue.

I think I prefer the idea of city center data centres where the excess heat is put to use for central heating systems

Thermodynamics fail.

Global warming is not caused by humans creating heat. There is nothing humans could do that would produce even the tiniest fraction of the thermal energy that reaches the Earth from the sun.

Global warming is caused by GHG which increase the percentage of the thermal energy from the sun which is trapped. The sun is so off the charts powerful compared to anything heat sources produced by humans that even the tiniest increase in the greenhouse effect can raise global temperatures.

This got me curious, so I did a bit of googling and some arithmetic. 2015 global energy consumption was about 575 x 10^15 BTU, or roughly 2 x 10^14 kWh. Meanwhile, averaged over the entire globe, insolation is about 6 kWh/m^2 per day, or globally about 1 x 10^18 kWh per year. If I haven't screwed anything up, that would make human energy consumption the equivalent of 0.02% of Earth's annual insolation. Personally I'd call that "within the tiniest fraction," but your point remains well taken; human energy consumption is a drop in the bucket compared to insolation.

 

[smyrgl]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

If the data center is completely sealed (aside from the fiber/power line) then all you need is atmospheric and tamper sensors to have the data center simply shut down if anyone is trying to mess with it. This can be both a safety and security measure.

 

[Jim Salter]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

If the data center is completely sealed (aside from the fiber/power line) then all you need is atmospheric and tamper sensors to have the data center simply shut down if anyone is trying to mess with it summon the laser sharks. This can be both a safety and security measure.

Friend, your logic is good but your action scenes need more pizazz.

 

[techgeek_us]

You mean to tell me not one of these servers displayed "Press F1 to continue?"

 

[williamyf]

It takes significant time and specialized effort to acquire and develop commercial real estate for a traditional data center in a major city—building a sealed pod and deploying it on the seafloor nearby should be considerably simpler and faster

so what sort of rules are there around storing your stuff on the seafloor? This has got 'tragedy of the commons' written all over it if everybody just starts dumping pods full of servers wherever they want.

The same rules that apply to Fiber Optic transoceanic cables and Festoons. In particular, there are detailed rules on the cable landings. The same rules apply to this sort of deployment.

 

[Jim Salter]

You mean to tell me not one of these servers displayed "Press F1 to continue?"

"Bang 'shave and a haircut' on the pod wall to continue."

 

[williamyf]

Couldn't they just seal datacenters and pressurize them with nitrogen on land? That seems like that'd get you basically all the benefits of this setup without having to, you know, actually submerge the thing in the ocean.

you lose the benefit of the "sort of free" seawater cooling, as well as the (posible) shielding from Ionizing radiation (cosmic rays and others) that tends to cause failures in electronic equipment

 

[williamyf]

With enough data centres like these, all the excess heat will go straight into the sea, further contributing to climate change. The only place these data centres wouldn’t contribute further to climate change is if they were buried deep down in earth’s crust but then cooling would be an issue.

I think I prefer the idea of city center data centres where the excess heat is put to use for central heating systems

The heat is going into the environment one way or the other anyway. Even if the heat is redirected to heating a building, the heat then goes from the building into the environment.

Also, the amount of heat the oceans absorb from these would be negligible compared to what they absorb from solar radiation every single day. You might see some minor local heating in the immediate environment, but that's not really a concern compared to the reduced energy usage (and therefore reduced CO2 emissions) needed for the cooling system.

My point about “recycling” the heat is that you don’t need to produce two units of heat (1 as a byproduct from the data center, the other for keeping buildings at liveable temperature). Byproduct heat of data center is subtracted in part from energy required to heat a building; this leading ultimately to less overall heat dumped in the atmosphere. What am I missing?

you are missing, among other things, that not all the countries in the planet need to keep buildings warm. And even where that is needed, is not all year round, so, when the extra heat is not needed, well, now you have a double trouble.

Besides, this is/was an experiment. Only time will tell if it goes into production (I hope it does)

 

[afidel]

With enough data centres like these, all the excess heat will go straight into the sea, further contributing to climate change. The only place these data centres wouldn’t contribute further to climate change is if they were buried deep down in earth’s crust but then cooling would be an issue.

I think I prefer the idea of city center data centres where the excess heat is put to use for central heating systems

The heat is going into the environment one way or the other anyway. Even if the heat is redirected to heating a building, the heat then goes from the building into the environment.

Also, the amount of heat the oceans absorb from these would be negligible compared to what they absorb from solar radiation every single day. You might see some minor local heating in the immediate environment, but that's not really a concern compared to the reduced energy usage (and therefore reduced CO2 emissions) needed for the cooling system.

My point about “recycling” the heat is that you don’t need to produce two units of heat (1 as a byproduct from the data center, the other for keeping buildings at liveable temperature). Byproduct heat of data center is subtracted in part from energy required to heat a building; this leading ultimately to less overall heat dumped in the atmosphere. What am I missing?

you are missing, among other things, that not all the countries in the planet need to keep buildings warm. And even where that is needed, is not all year round, so, when the extra heat is not needed, well, now you have a double trouble.

Besides, this is/was an experiment. Only time will tell if it goes into production (I hope it does)

With absorption cooling you can also use the waste heat to run a refrigeration cycle that will allow for cooling.

 

[williamyf]

Another factor is the potential for littering the oceans with vaguely toxic electronics debris. Say someone puts one of these pods down there, and then goes bankrupt. Whose responsibility is it now to remove it? Eventually (maybe decades, but eventually) the pressure hull will rust through.

I'm not saying this is a showstopper, but it's something that needs to be considered. Companies will swear up and down that they'll take responsibility for long-term cleanup, but we all know how often that's a lie.

that is simple to fix.

In order to grant permisison for deployment, the government (which in all contries of the world controls this types of things) demands that the money for recovery of pods after their usseful life is put on an escrow account in order to gain permission to deploy.

Other fix, more private company like, is for some enterprising insurance company to develop a product where, if the company goes under and is unable to retrieve the pods, they do it. the less financialy solid the company deploying, the higher the cost of the insurance.

Other way is to add a clause in the contract that, if 6 months after the due date for retriveral the pod is not retired, it can be salvaged by a privateer, and it's sale covers part of the recovery cost....

 

[Pueo]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

Given the history of both the US and Russia tapping underwater cables, I'd say the USS Jimmy Carter can expect a new addition to the MMP and a new body courtesy of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit in the near future.

 

[williamyf]

I wonder if being underwater would provide any protection from CMEs/geomagnetic storm type events?

Unless the hull of the pod was specifically designed to be EM resistant and the input power was filtered and isolated, there's a good chance that a large em pulse would take it out anyway.

The power would be the only issue. 120 feet of water is one hell of an EMF attenuator. It takes about 5cm of water to halve the intensity of gamma rays below 200 keV.

For reference, 120 feet of water is roughly equivalent to six to twelve feet of solid lead as a radiation shield...

Knowing almost nothing about EMF/EMPs, does the big power cable going to it (say, a hypothetical shore power cable to go with your hypothetical EMP) make any difference to that?

Not directly. The cable's under all that water also. Your real concern is whether the EMP causes enough of a surge in any above-ground portion of the grid to propagate down that shore power line, and whether or not you've got breakers sufficiently fast and capable to interrupt the surge before it hits the expensive stuff.

Along, of course, with whether or not you've got some other way of powering the goods once the power goes out. And/or whether the servers are able to power themselves back on if power is ever interrupted to the entire pod.

The Marine Energy Research Centre is specifically mucking about with tidal current and wave motion electrical generation, which would in theory remove that avenue for failure also. If you end up not needing shore power at all and the only thing tethering the pod to the surface is fiber, you'd no longer have a route for an EMP to screw up your pod at all. But that's an if.

Except that, for mechanical reasons, the fiber is surrounded by a steel protective layer. You'd need to replace that with a kevlar or carbon nanotube construct to do the same function while being imprevious to an EMP/Solar flare. Other than that the logic is flawless.

this was meant to be a joke. ¿Could Ars get a Joke alert gif like the tegister?

 

[williamyf]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

In the telco world we have a joke. In order for a well commisiones telco switch not to fail, you only need an attack dog and a kid, the attack dog is to make sure no one touches the switch, and the kid is to bring food and water to the dog.

 

[C.M. Allen]

With enough data centres like these, all the excess heat will go straight into the sea, further contributing to climate change. The only place these data centres wouldn’t contribute further to climate change is if they were buried deep down in earth’s crust but then cooling would be an issue.

I think I prefer the idea of city center data centres where the excess heat is put to use for central heating systems

Thermodynamics fail.

Global warming is not caused by humans creating heat. There is nothing humans could do that would produce even the tiniest fraction of the thermal energy that reaches the Earth from the sun.

Global warming is caused by GHG which increase the percentage of the thermal energy from the sun which is trapped. The sun is so off the charts powerful compared to any heat sources produced by humans that even the tiniest increase in the greenhouse effect can raise global temperatures.

To wit: the Sun bombards the Earth with more energy in *ONE HOUR* than the entire human race uses in a year. One. Hour.

And there are fools who still thing solar power isn't viable....

 

[JuniorTempest]

You mean to tell me not one of these servers displayed "Press F1 to continue?"

I'm sure they had a crash dive cart.

 

[williamyf]

You mean to tell me not one of these servers displayed "Press F1 to continue?"

Welcome to the wonderfull world of BMC, iRAC, DRAC, iLO, etc.

 

[Frennzy]

Amongst it all latency pops up and the wo to go scenario is used which makes it interesting.

What in the world makes you think that a DC just slightly offshore increases latency in any meaningful way?

 

[Jim Salter]

Amongst it all latency pops up and the wo to go scenario is used which makes it interesting.

What in the world makes you think that a DC just slightly offshore increases latency in any meaningful way?

Microsoft's point is that it reduces latency, since you can get closer to most major population centers by going a little off shore than you would putting them where the land is cheap.

 

[Autapomorphy]

Note that 100,000J/y is a very very small amount of energy, ~3.171 milliwatts. I don't know how much power these pods use, but I'm willing to bet it's at least a million times highter (thousands of watts)

I think I may also have messed up on my conversion of KM^3 to liters. I think it should have been ~5.6^e24.

So, 56,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 liters.

Let's call it 100,000 of these again. That's 56,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules you'd need, per container. Let's call it 100 billion joules per container per year. That's 56,000,000 years it would take to raise it one degree. Another way of expressing it is if you wanted to raise the ocean 1/10th of a degree, over the course of 100 years, it would take 5,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules per year to do so. If each unit puts out 100,000,000,000 joules per year, you would need 5,600,000,000 of these things. If each one is 10 meters squared space, you'd need 56,000,000 km^2 of space. Or approximately an area 10 times the size of Europe.

This is all if my calculations are correct. Which, again, they almost certainly are not.
In fact, my guess is that by the time I've finished editing this, they've already been proven wrong.

Edited words to make units more clear
Edited again to try fancy maths regarding number of units needed

A cubic kilometer is 1000^3 = 1 billion cubic meters. A cubic meter of water is one metric ton, 1000kg, 1000 liters.

A cubic kilometer of water is thus 1 trillion liters. That's less than one billionth of the ocean. It really is unfathomable.

I'm an engineer so I cannot do math. That's why there's Wolfram Alpha: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+water+in+the+oceans+in+liters

If you want to be more accurate about the difference between seawater and plain water, you can also ask about that:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/...1+degree+celsius+difference+in+kilowatt+hours

And get an answer of 1.5 * 10^18 kWh of energy to move the temperature of the ocean by one degree.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=worldwide+power+production gives worldwide power production as 2.2*10^13 kWh per year.

That brings us to https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/...erence+/+worldwide+power+production)+in+years for 70,000 years worth all of human electricity production to heat the oceans by 1 degree. Global warming, as we've been learning, is much faster at it than the world's largest aquarium heater could ever hope to be.

 

[mmiller7]

Honestly this whole cloud thing is really misleading. Why not blimps!?

I don't know about clouds and blimps......but it sure is a whole new meaning to "storage pool".....

 

[mmiller7]

Couldn't they just seal datacenters and pressurize them with nitrogen on land? That seems like that'd get you basically all the benefits of this setup without having to, you know, actually submerge the thing in the ocean.

Article goes into it a bit more; you gain the lower land cost (almost free, compared to paying for the land space), you get the cooling (convection? through the walls) that far outstrips the comparable cooling you'd get in air, and you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

With the breaking in...I do wonder how that would go if some nation-state wanted to "break into" one?

Would it be that hard for them to sail up with a ship (or sub?) lift it up and be gone before anyone could come stop them? Or possibly connect a secret-sub to the side and get in to tap a machine or steal a few drives making it look like a hardware failure?

 

[georgedarroch]

you also gain security benefits (nobody around to try and break in)

That is not going to be a forever thing—and I, for one, was already excited for future movies featuring SCUBA-enabled underwater physical pentests while I was writing the article.

I mean. There could legitimately be GUARD SHARKS. With frickin' lasers! (Okay, maybe not so much the lasers. And dolphins would probably be a better choice, or maybe sealions. And... and... and I still wanna see that movie.)

There was a Mission Impossible scene based around that premise, except it had freediving and robot patrols.

 

[mmiller7]

Not a great idea, unlike Physical Land location, if something does go wrong it could take days to repair and worst-case scenario a complete and total loss of all data.

Could easily be backed with a redundant datacenter(s) in other places including back on land but at the cost of being high latency and lower throughput. The storage array in a pod may have something like RAID-6 that can handle a multi-drive failure and the pods themselves could have 2 at the same/similar location for high-availability plus 1 remote "offsite" that is backups and reduced capacity high-availability. Many critical datacenters already operate in 2+ facilities to ensure a disaster at any one doesn't take out the whole system.

Similar but smaller scale, our "little" office has a single server for onsite AD domain controller (among other things) so logins onsite are instant, but if it blows up we can also run 100% normal ops from the corporate datacenter AD server as we used to, it just takes a while longer due to latency and throughput of the pipe connecting us to the world. Several seconds per unlock add up and are noticeable, but it wouldn't put us out of commission.

 

[georgedarroch]

Another factor is the potential for littering the oceans with vaguely toxic electronics debris. Say someone puts one of these pods down there, and then goes bankrupt. Whose responsibility is it now to remove it? Eventually (maybe decades, but eventually) the pressure hull will rust through.

I'm not saying this is a showstopper, but it's something that needs to be considered. Companies will swear up and down that they'll take responsibility for long-term cleanup, but we all know how often that's a lie.

that is simple to fix.

In order to grant permisison for deployment, the government (which in all contries of the world controls this types of things) demands that the money for recovery of pods after their usseful life is put on an escrow account in order to gain permission to deploy.

Other fix, more private company like, is for some enterprising insurance company to develop a product where, if the company goes under and is unable to retrieve the pods, they do it. the less financialy solid the company deploying, the higher the cost of the insurance.

Other way is to add a clause in the contract that, if 6 months after the due date for retriveral the pod is not retired, it can be salvaged by a privateer, and it's sale covers part of the recovery cost....

We have these kinds of agreements for mining, and some of them work well and are enforced. Others are not. I expect that some of these will end up permanently in the ocean, if the technology is adopted widely around the world.

 

[Auguste_Fivaz]

Couldn't they just seal datacenters and pressurize them with nitrogen on land? That seems like that'd get you basically all the benefits of this setup without having to, you know, actually submerge the thing in the ocean.

I wonder ... MS (and others) has some very large data centers in Quincy, Washington state, which is also a farming region with high grade top soil about 20 feet thick. Just up the street is a chain of hydro dams churning out some of the cheapest power in the country. Just up a little further is Wenachee, the apple capitol of the World. There, the fruit growers use enormous warehouses filled with nitrogen to keep the fruit prior to shipping. So, you have the infrastructure and knowledge in place in Eastern Washington to do exactly what you thought, just with bits not pits (stone fruit). Ever wonder how you get a "fresh" apple in April?

Aside: these data centers also resulted in fiber to the farm in Grant county spliced off the cable that runs to Seattle and who knows where else along the Burlington Northern tracks. Friends and family there had fiber to their houses years before I got mine in Northern California.

 

[pusher robot]

Another factor is the potential for littering the oceans with vaguely toxic electronics debris. Say someone puts one of these pods down there, and then goes bankrupt. Whose responsibility is it now to remove it? Eventually (maybe decades, but eventually) the pressure hull will rust through.

I'm not saying this is a showstopper, but it's something that needs to be considered. Companies will swear up and down that they'll take responsibility for long-term cleanup, but we all know how often that's a lie.

that is simple to fix.

In order to grant permisison for deployment, the government (which in all contries of the world controls this types of things) demands that the money for recovery of pods after their usseful life is put on an escrow account in order to gain permission to deploy.

Other fix, more private company like, is for some enterprising insurance company to develop a product where, if the company goes under and is unable to retrieve the pods, they do it. the less financialy solid the company deploying, the higher the cost of the insurance.

Other way is to add a clause in the contract that, if 6 months after the due date for retriveral the pod is not retired, it can be salvaged by a privateer, and it's sale covers part of the recovery cost....

We have these kinds of agreements for mining, and some of them work well and are enforced. Others are not. I expect that some of these will end up permanently in the ocean, if the technology is adopted widely around the world.

And even then, what would be the real harm? We regularly intentionally dump iron-rich scrap offshore to create artificial reefs. Even assuming the pod was breached and vented to the sea I'm struggling to think of anything in the servers that would be highly toxic. A few heavy metals perhaps would leach out over time, but diluted in the ocean it would hardly be detectable - and even then, solder is lead-free now, any batteries likely to be lithium rather than cadmium.