What's the benefit from using an off shore platform against building them on the beach and using pipes for cooling?
Zoning laws and jurisdiction, perhaps.
Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#52Wasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling?
What happened to that?
Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark.
As of yet I have not seen the use of server racks as structural architectural features. They always seem to need a vast shed that has its own supports, when server racks could also be the walls and supports for much of the building, or some other structure, maybe a road bridge.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt Russian nuclear ice breakers have naval escort. Until recently they operated within the coverage of on-shore long range SAM systems (but most of these SAM systems were moved elsewhere recently e.g. to protect oil refineries so Northern Sea Route is no longer protected).
I don’t think that anyone would want to steal an icebreaker, but a datacenter full of valuable equipment and interesting information is a more likely target.
Would a marine raid by ship be lower risk than a smash and grab by panel-van on land?
I imagine land is a lower bar to entry, accessible to a much larger criminal base, but security response times and road surveillance is tough.
I'm too much of a land-lubber to know how easy it is vanish from a coastal crime scene by ship. The sea... nowhere to hide but very big. Can satellites track you these days? If wanting to nab a container or two that's a big ship. Not much you could put in a minisub or sub-surface thing. A James Bond villain could cut the supports and drag the whole thing to the hollowed out mountain of their island lair.
I need Michael Mann to make "Heat but on a boat" to educate me.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#54What about (extreme) weather? The nice pictures looks like being in open sea, and there big storms may have an expensive impact if not everything is taken into account.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#55YCombinator S26? Guys, guys, guys... so hear me out - remember last month when we were all giddy about datacenters in space? Well, apparently investors weren't too keen on that idea so we've come up with something much better: Nuclear datacenters at sea! Now this is truly a visionary proposition that will certainly become another unicorn and have no issues whatsoever.
The current major roadblocks for any datacenter are, planning permissions, power connections, and cooling. The on a barge approach solves all of the above, unlike space which makes all of these problems worse.
Its power connections which is the major roadblock and as such obviously planning permissions get tricky because as we see in so many cases, so much grid electricity is used that that the planning permissions become tricky and rightfully so.
As many countries are now trying to suggest, bring your own power and we are happy.
So in that sense, Nuclear? sure, already being tried but not fast or big enough right now.
Sea? I don't think so. You literally get into murky waters on the future of the project and this part feels really hype based, atleast to me.
Perhaps some people feel that Sea could cool things off but in my understanding, if you already have nuclear, it would be better building Datacenters in colder stranded regions then to have really effective temperature/natural cooling.
Power is the core issue, Everything else is bolted on top of it in my opinion.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#56Avoiding legal jurisdiction, regulation and tax by being offshore. Bring on the exploding drone boats.
You also lose the protections given by legal jurisdictions.
Also regulation and tax by being offshore have much easier ways to be bypassed and which are already being done effectively so by utilizing already existing legal structures and jurisdictions I think.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#57So Much land. Even non civilized lands, Even near sea for piping water. What does this idea solve? Or just adds problems like, Non secure assets/nucclear on the sea.
You can not move datacenter built on land. But you can tow this datacenter to new direction if needed. Just like "Howl's Moving Castle" :)
If this is just designed for AI economics. The end output of these datacenters are the tokens which are mostly relatively really small data and is not sensitive to latency.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#58Wasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling? What happened to that? Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark. As of yet I have not seen the us…
The price of Datacenter are the AI chips but the bottleneck in creation of them is power, given how much power exhaustive they are (and rightfully so) people protesting against it because its them who pays the price.
That being said, the shipping container idea is decent but the bottleneck is still power not so much cooling, so unless someone figures out a way to have an actual nuclear power reactor, there are issues.
Also oh the issue isn't that there aren't nuclear power reactors but that they aren't large enough. Some nuclear powered datacenters exist in some experimental settngs but these new Datacenters are trying to take a magnitude more and they can't wait for the production of those things and further research.
Re: Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
#59YCombinator S26? Guys, guys, guys... so hear me out - remember last month when we were all giddy about datacenters in space? Well, apparently investors weren't too keen on that idea so we've come up with something much better: Nuclear datacenters at sea! Now this is truly a visionary proposition that will certainly become another unicorn and have no issues whatsoever.
Up next: nuclear data center Zeppelins in the cloud! Innovative new air cooling: instead of using lots of tiny fans to move air through the servers, we simply use 2 big fans to move the servers through the air! And while we're at it, we'll completely disrupt the existing Zeppelin market that depends on expensive helium for some reason. We use daring, innovative hydrogen technology, enabling a massive cost reduction!
the term zeppelins needs to be used more often.
love this idea, where do i mail my money to invest!!!!!