if you've ever built or upgraded a computer with liquid cooling you'll know
how effective it can be to put your CPU under water
i mean not literally but under a water block that has liquid circulating
through it but could actually submerging computers in the
world's largest reservoir the freaking ocean be the way of the future well
microsoft seems to think so and they're already operating underwater server
farms with other large cloud providers likely to follow suit but why are they
bothering with something that sounds like it's straight out of futurama and
how does that even work well it might be fairly easy and cheap to
cool your home pc adequately a 20 air
cooler and a couple of case fans is probably going to get the job done just
fine but when we're talking about cooling off a massive data center
housing thousands of servers we're talking millions of watts cooling costs
start to add up very quickly in fact
it's estimated that data firms spend around a billion and a half dollars
every year in electricity costs just to
keep their server farms cool so at these scales efficiency really starts to
matter and yeah you could always strap thousands of
water coolers to these servers and call it a day but you would still have to get
rid of the hot air coming off the radiators so it turns out it's more
efficient to just take the entire data center and drop it in the sea
you see water has a high heat capacity
meaning it can store lots of heat energy without changing its own temperature
very much think about how a puddle next to the
swimming pool can stay relatively cool compared to the scorching hot concrete
right next to it so an underwater data center housed in a
watertight pod only needs a relatively
simple heat exchanger to dump its waste heat into the surrounding seawater this
saves an enormous amount of energy compared to forcing hot air out of data
centers on land especially when you consider just how much ocean water there is to
absorb the heat also helping matters is the fact that
the ocean is quite cold once you go deep
enough so you'd only have to submerge a server pod in one or 200 meters of sea
water to get excellent cooling even in warm tropical regions
and better cooling isn't even the only benefit to ocean-based server farms
land-based data centers often have to be located in sparsely populated areas due
to their physical size and lower costs
for the land and the energy although this can save money it also means that
the data has to travel further to get to you meaning more latency and lower
speeds underwater server pods by contrast can be placed close to coastal
areas where far more people live in fact forty percent of the global population
resides within a hundred kilometers of a coastline meaning that a coastal server
pod could make your internet experience feel a bit snappier and speaking of
snappier it should actually be faster to
build a bunch of server pods and then dunk them in the ocean compared to
building new land-based data centers every time a company needs to increase
capacity i mean sure it comes with some engineering challenges for sure but not
only does constructing a big server warehouse require a lot of land you also
have to consider local conditions such as topography the workforce and
government restrictions anywhere you want to build one underwater server
farms though could be built in assembly line fashion almost identically and then
quickly shipped to any place that needs them and they could even be moved around
if necessary they would just need to be connected to data lines and a power
source so one microsoft pod that's currently off the scottish coast draws
power from a nearby wind farm on the orkney islands in fact offshore wind
installations may prove to be a popular solution for powering these pods in the
not so distant future now of course sticking a bunch of servers underwater
presents some real challenges you can't exactly just send a team of divers out
every time a hard drive fails so the pods need to be designed with
redundancies and better remote access to allow landlubber technicians to handle
problems more effectively and i mean here's another fun one engineers have
even had to work on devising special coatings for the outside of these pods
to repel barnacles so it turns out that barnacles can
interfere with heat transfer though i mean i guess they could just do what old
school seafarers did and send an intern down to scrape them off right
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that's it's down there and also subscribe that's down there too
so you got to go like looking for it it's like uh it's like submersion
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but that's not my finest work