China Submerges a Data Center in the Ocean to Conserve Water, is That Even a Good Idea?

upstart writes:

Data centers are water and power hogs, but does putting them in the ocean help?:

Data centers like those used to train and run AI models have this irksome tendency to drain the local water supply for the purpose of cooling through heat exchange, sometimes worsening water scarcity in an area. They also suck down so much energy that they drive up demand, and it appears we may be paying for it with higher bills.

Maybe the solution is right under our noses: submerge the data centers in the ocean, and power them with wind.

In Shanghai's Lin-gang Special Area, a new project that cost the equivalent of $226 million has proven that such a project can at least get through the early phase of construction. In theory, this will be a sort of free lunch for compute once it's completed: water ceases to be an issue, as does the data center's carbon footprint. But is it actually a good idea?

Reports about the project have been published in a few places, including Wired. The facility, Wired's story notes, currently has "a total power capacity of 24 megawatts." That's like a normal, pre-AI data center, according to a report by McKinsey, which notes that data centers "that averaged tens of megawatts before 2020 will be expected to accommodate at the gigawatt scale" in the coming years.

That story also notes that over 95 percent of the center's energy "comes from offshore wind turbines," so it sounds as if the energy comes from wind that is then wired in, rather than having a wind power generating station installed right there at the data center.

But as Wired also pointed out in a story last year about a smaller, but similar, project in the US, this might not be a great idea. In part, that's because while it may sound green, the heat exchange from all those GPUs would at least to some degree heat up the ocean-one of the main things climate hawks are trying to avoid.

The founders of a startup called NetworkOcean said they would "dunk a small capsule filled with GPU servers into San Francisco Bay," but did so "without having sought, much less received, any permits from key regulators," Wired's Paresh Dave and Reece Rogers note. Dave and Rogers sought out commentary from multiple scientists, learning that even minor temperature changes in the bay "could trigger toxic algae blooms and harm wildlife." And a data center doesn't have to be huge to cause problems. "Any increase" in temperature is a potential problem, as it could "incubate harmful algae and attract invasive species."

A 2022 paper on underwater data centers further speculated that unpredictable events like ocean heatwaves near such data centers would result in animals essentially suffocating in de-oxygenated water.

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