There are data centers at the bottom of the ocean.
I'm not crazy. There's not very many of them. This is still very much experimental,
but it's an idea that could revolutionize waste heat management,
which is something I think about a lot. In 2015, Microsoft sunk its first prototype underwater data center
off the coast of California and left it there for two months.
In 2018, they did it again. They sunk an airtight metal storage tank with 864 servers
and 27.6 petabytes of storage near the Scottish Orkney Islands,
117 feet below the surface. They declared that experiment a success after two years,
noting that the sealed server tank had an eighth of the failure rate
of a conventional data center. Now, as promising as these results are,
there are some obvious drawbacks to sinking a server
in a large natural body of water. Using a data center's waste heat to warm a local swimming pool
is relatively easy in comparison because we're dealing with a controlled artificial environment.
But humans, aside from Jason Lamoa, cannot control the ocean.
See, the problem with the ocean is that it is incredibly deep
and incredibly salty, like a goth girl with tarot cards.
Ocean water has a typical salinity of 3.5% compared to freshwater,
which has a salinity of 0.5% or less.
What this means is that saltwater is essentially an electrolyte solution,
which increases conductivity and chemically accelerates corrosion.
That's not an insurmountable barrier, though, because humanity has a lot of experience protecting
these submerged parts of metal watercraft through anti-corrosion coatings,
like specialized paint, active galvanic protection, and coal tar enamel.
Of course, we could also use freshwater sources like relatively deep lakes,
but the ocean, being massive, would allow us to implement sunken servers on a much larger scale.
You'd still need data centers to serve population centers further inland,
but around 40% of the global population lives within 100 miles of the coast,
which is nothing to sneeze at. Now, another problem is that water is actually pretty heavy.
With every additional 100 feet below sea level, we're piling on an extra three atmospheres of pressure.
But we're never going to put these data centers anywhere other than the relatively shallow continental shelf,
because we'd want them to be relatively close by. Fortunately, a typical cylindrical storage container with thick metal walls
can easily withstand the pressure of a few hundred feet of seawater.
These data centers also have to be reliably anchored in place to stop them from shifting.
You wouldn't be able to tell just by looking, but there are strong currents deep underneath the surface.
Not to mention that hurricanes can churn up water from hundreds of feet deep
and sometimes wind up disturbing sunken wrecks on the seafloor.
The 2018 Microsoft data center used a triangular base loaded with heavy ballast.
It also wound up coated in a layer of algae and colonized by sea anemones
after only two years underwater. Animal interference isn't too much of an issue for a thick metal container,
but any cable leading to or from the container should ideally be wrapped in Kevlar
and buried below the seabed to protect it from shark attacks.
Oh, that's not a joke. For unclear reasons, possibly related to sharks' electroreceptive senses,
they occasionally chomp on undersea cables. But these are all solvable problems with current technology,
and the idea has enormous potential benefits. The primary advantage of sinking servers is consistent, relatively cheap cooling.
On the surface, temperature and humidity vary from hour to hour.
The bottom of the ocean, however, has an extremely consistent cold temperature.
That's because deep bodies of water typically stratify by density,
which means that they also stratify by temperature. So even though the surface of the water gets heated by the sun and stirred by the wind,
that water rarely interacts with the layers of colder, denser water deep below.
When the server is surrounded by consistent, low-temperature water,
less additional energy is expended on the cooling process,
which is a cost and efficiency win, but also a marginal environmental win.
Likewise, large data centers in major urban areas can cost a fair amount in rent
because they compete for space with offices, industries, and airbnbs.
Data centers are one of the few business assets that could be relocated to the bottom of the ocean,
where they wouldn't really compete with fish so much as get gradually colonized by them.
If we were then able to leave these servers in place and not touch them for around a decade,
the disruption to the benthic biome would be minimal.
These underwater data servers also take advantage of an idea that has been used on land,
sealing the servers in an airtight, oxygen-free environment that is instead filled with a dry,
neutral gas like nitrogen. Nitrogen is less corrosive than oxygen and non-flammable,
increasing server longevity and preventing fires.
In these conditions, the lack of on-site maintenance has a hidden advantage.
Human-machine interactions always have the possibility of bumps,
jostling, and other forms of human error that increase the risk of accidental damage.
A much, much lower failure rate means that with sufficient redundancy,
the server can be left in place, with drives replaced only during scheduled turnover.
Speaking of turnover, my turn to speak is now over.
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