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
Thing is, all of this heat would have gone into the atmosphere already.
At least using the ocean as a heat sink consumes way less energy than running on-shore AC for the facility, thus being a relative net gain overall.
While it's true that the heat would have gone into the environment anyway, the OP's point is likely that the posited central heating will have to be achieved be other means without the servers thus effectively doubling the heat load to the environment.
True, but in order to see a net overall benefit, the data center owners would have to be ok with their centers physically located in residential areas, directly piping the heat to homeowners over relatively short runs.
As I recall, 40% of a data center's electricity need comes from the need to cool the equipment. Despite that, there likely isn't enough heat to warm more than a few homes this way, while electricity use for cooling and transporting said heat would still remain high.
