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

 

[cniru]

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

Others have covered the fact that the reduced power load from lack of AC almost certainly outpaces this, but also, it's...really unrealistic given the size of the oceans. There are over 1.3 trillion liters of seawater in the world. It takes 4,200 joules to raise it by one degree. That's 5,586,000,000,000,000 joules.

You could put 100,000 of these in the ocean, each putting off 100,000 joules a year for 100,000 years, and it would have raised the temperature of the ocean by less than 2/10ths of a degree (celsius).

You got that volume seriously wrong - Earth ocean volume is around 1.35 billion cubic kilometers , multiply that by another trilion to get the number in liters - so its 1.35e+21 liters. At 4186 J/kg/deg C that is 5.65e24 (that's 5.65 trillion trillion) Joules of energy.

edit: a name for 1e24, bbcode fix, typo
edit 2: Multi-ninja'd

 

[cniru]

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.

Wenatchee is no apple capital of the World - your take is much like the "World Series" I dare say! China alone produces more apples than the rest of the world combined, and even India produces about 1/2 the US output, and we are a sub-tropical country with all its jolly pests making sub-par productivity, where Apple don't wanna grow. And lest you ask - I know Wenatchee or its claims to Apples, went to school in WSU and have close friends working at the TFREC.

The US like in many other things have outsourced their food production too, much to the chagrin of many farmers, there are too many dimensions to the current economic mess and inequality in the US.