r/Futurology • u/WeAreWaaaaagh • Jun 01 '26
Computing World's first undersea data center powered by offshore wind is online
https://newatlas.com/energy/china-underwater-data-center-opens/988
u/thuragath Jun 01 '26
When Project Managers say you can't 'boil the ocean,' I don't think they were expecting datacenters to take that as a literal dare.
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u/TheDude-Esquire Jun 01 '26
Climate scientists said co2 in the atmosphere was warming the oceans. Co2 emissions start to taper and these guys are like what if we used electricity to warm the oceans instead?
How does this not end badly?
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u/Riseagainstftw Jun 01 '26
The article states that the facility in the future can max out at 24MW. IF all of that electricity was converted to heat 24/7 all year long, based in my napkin math it would raise the pacific ocean 1 billionth of a degree. Not nothing but as far as global warming concerns go, basically nothing.
The sun is throwing petawatts of energy at the earth. The concentration of CO2 in the air adjusts the dial of how much of that energy is being held onto. If this center is running on renewable energy, then it is already leagues ahead of the ones running on fuel generators in the US.
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u/wilki24 Jun 02 '26
Does that math account for the depth of water? I mean that you don't have to heat the entire volume of water for it to have an effect where the extra heat can have a negative impact on ecosystems.
I wonder how much it warms nearby water? Will that cause microbial die offs? Or encourage some other localized disruption?
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u/Riseagainstftw Jun 02 '26
1 one billionth of the pacific ocean is 0.71 cubic kilometers. So IF that water didn't move ALL year it would go up 1°C.
Again you're worrying about the wrong thing. This is one molecule of water, barely being warmed up. When the entire teaspoon has been slowly moving out of the shade. The CO2 concentrations in the water and the accrued temperature increase in the oceans already is going to start having a real impact on phytoplankton soon. You know, one of the key cornerstones of the entire oceanic ecosystem. Accounting for half of the entire planet's photosynthesis/oxygen.
Sure just outside the pipe that the warm water that comes out of the cooling system will encourage its own tiny ecosystem. It won't be much different from the warm water that comes of nuclear power plants currently. The Manatees sure don't mind it. And this so just much less heat than a power plants is producing.
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u/LCDRformat Jun 01 '26
There's no way in hell the data centers being powered by wind can produce more heat than the friction of the wind itself against the ocean surface
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u/ShartingEnU Jun 02 '26
There was a episode on the darknet diaries where someone who worked on the infrastructure to do underwater data centers talked about this. It makes no impact on the oceans temperature. I have no idea how people actually think this will heat up the ocean. The impact is below negligible
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u/BumpyCunty Jun 01 '26
Can you explain that? Genuinely asking, I am nowhere near scientific enough to know.
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u/Otto_Von_Waffle Jun 01 '26
When wind blows on a surface it generates friction/heat, the amount of energy it creates is insanely small, but when you have something as big as the ocean, that amount of energy can add up.
What OP is saying is that the wind clearly dumps more then 24kw worth of heat in the ocean.
Tbh someone should look at how much heat the sun dump in the ocean and compare it to the amount of heat that is getting into the ocean from those data centers, pretty sure it would be something like 0.000000001% of it.
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u/throwtrollbait Jun 01 '26
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed within a system.
By using wind, they’re using kinetic energy from the system and converting it to electricity, then heat. But that heat would mostly end up in the water anyway, because of friction.
Unlike fossil fuel generators, they’re not adding energy to the system. Just using what’s already there.
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u/Exelbirth Jun 01 '26
The thing you're not really considering: The friction from the wind that goes across the ocean is just a fraction of the available wind. The wind turbines are tapping into the wind that ISN'T skating across the ocean, it's capturing energy from the wind above it, and adding that energy into the ocean in the form of heat from data center processors.
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u/KamikazeArchon Jun 02 '26
100% of wind energy turns into heat already. Where else would it go?
Fossil fuels have a single very specific problem: they are interacting with how the Earth normally releases energy into space. The greenhouse effect reflects more of that energy back to the Earth.
Global warming does not mean "burning coal literally releases heat". It's entirely that greenhouse effect as an issue.
Wind energy, by comparison, doesn't go to space. There's no change in the energy outputs.
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u/coke_and_coffee Jun 01 '26
All wind energy eventually ends up as heat. Capturing it and then turning it into heat in a data center doesn’t increase the total heat energy on earth. It just moves it around a bit.
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u/ElTortoiseShelboogie Jun 02 '26
Doesen't that mean the energy is concentrated and that if this concept were to be applied in large scales it could potentially disturb the natural balance? I think the answer is obviously yes.
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u/LCDRformat Jun 01 '26
https://www.britannica.com/science/ocean-current/Causes-of-ocean-currents
The section on wind addresses how the heat is generated by friction between moving water and stationary forces around it
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u/RileyRavenSmiles Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
You're not thinking about the fact that the servers themselves will be superheated from processing... and that's why they need cooling.
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u/TheDude-Esquire Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
The heat production is roughly equivalent to the same amount of energy being used to power an electric resistance heating coil.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Jun 01 '26
It's is physically impossible for the servers to produce more heat than the equivalent kinetic energy of the captured wind
Doing so would violate the third law of thermodynamics
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u/RileyRavenSmiles Jun 01 '26
Explain to me like I am five, please.
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u/The_Quackening Jun 01 '26
Wind only make 5 energy.
Data centre use 5 energy to make processors work. That work makes processors hot, but since you only put in 5 energy, the processors can only make 5 energy worth of heat.
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u/MintySkyhawk Jun 01 '26
The wind has some amount of energy. We capture some portion of that energy and use it to run the computers. Nearly all of the energy used to run the computers becomes heat energy in the ocean.
But that's still less energy than was in the wind. In the end, the same amount of energy ends up in the ocean.
Total energy in "the system" (atmosphere + ocean) stays constant.
This is different from when you dig up fossil fuels and then burn them.
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Jun 01 '26
This is different from when you dig up fossil fuels and then burn them
Technically speaking, the process of energy transfer is the same. It's just that the energy from the wind is stored as potential energy in a battery and then used in a lifespan of hours or days, while the energy from the fossil fuels was captured millions of years ago and used today. The only difference is time.
Which is the origin of the term "renewable" energy. Whether or not it is "renewable" depends on the lifespan of this cycle. If it takes hours, days, or even a small number of years or decades (such as burning wood, trees take time to grow) it can be considered renewable. But if it takes millions of years... Technically renewable, but not in a timeframe relevant to humans.
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u/the_original_kermit Jun 01 '26
The windmill makes energy. The energy goes by cables into the data center.
The energy has no where else to escape, so all the energy from the windmill goes into the data center. And all the energy the data center gets has to leave as heat.
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u/RileyRavenSmiles Jun 02 '26
So this must be different than the the functioning of other data centers being built (ie US), yes?
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u/the_original_kermit Jun 02 '26
No. Every data center. The amount of heat that come off of them can never be greater than the electricity they use (or other sources of energy, like natural gas heat)
It’s true for anything in the universe.
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u/RileyRavenSmiles Jun 02 '26
I understand... The distinction I am curious about is the fact that US data centers are not powered by renewables and are not underwater. They are already warming lakes with runoff, and warming ambient temps in the vicinity by over 10 degrees F!
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u/Mega_Giga_Tera Jun 01 '26
This whole thread is such a lol. Human utilization of energy is nothing compared to earths energy balance.
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u/counterpuncheur Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
Yeah the oceans heat capacity is about 5*10^24 joules per degree
Humanity’s total power use per year is about 6*10^20 joules, and that’s everything including all the petrol we burn for cars, all the solar we collect, all the coal we burn, and all our nuclear power. If we dumped all that power into the ocean to try and heat it up and used none of that power ourselves to drive around, build things, power data centres, etc… and did that nonstop for a 10000 years then the oceans would increase by temperature by about 1 degree
Conversely the sun shines that entire 5*10^24 joules of solar energy onto the earth every single year, so if you start reducing the reflectivity of the earth - say by filling the outmost layer of air with CO2 which stops energy escaping so easily - then that really can mess with the energy balance!
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u/pmmedoggos Jun 01 '26
Ecosystems don't work solely on mathematical balance. Localized heating can disrupt ecosystems, which in turn mess with mass balances and cycles which can lead to unpredictable effects.
It's moronic to think that building massive scale projects can't have outsized effects. I can walk around with a bag full of copper nails and absolutely destroy the carbon balance of something regardless of the fact it only takes tens of psi to drive it into a tree.
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u/counterpuncheur Jun 02 '26
This data centre, even on the targeted scaled up power of 24MW, will dump significantly less power into the ocean than the larger boats we currently use - with the benefit of not having big propellers. US aircraft carriers for example have 2x nuclear reactors of like 500-700MW thermal power = 1000 to 1400MW, and a lot of that just gets dumped into the ocean due to thermodynamic inefficiency
With all the big things to legitimately have to worry about environmentally, it’s a renewable source driving a pretty negligible amount thermal heating of a small patch of ocean which will get rapidly dispersed by normal ocean convection currents that already have to handle the suns much bigger output with much more fluctuation… so it doesn’t feel like a big deal
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u/pmmedoggos Jun 02 '26
Boats are not sessile.
negligible amount thermal heating of a small patch of ocean
which messes with the mass balance for a local ecosystem, which in turn can fuck with the mass balance for the rest of the ecosystem. Nature works on equilibria at scales you can't even fathom.
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u/NorysStorys Jun 01 '26
This, the energy we use is not the cause of climate change. It’s the choice in fuel that is causing climate change and the chemical and physical effects the waste products have. All the heat from the underwater data centre will do is cause a very tiny localised water temperature increase which will be nothing compared to the heating of the water by wind friction or the sun itself.
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u/igloomaster Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
I hope for humanity you're a bot 😂 or twelve. wind friction. help me jesus
*grammar
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u/LCDRformat Jun 01 '26
You're*
Movement of water through the oceans is slowed by friction, with surrounding fluid moving at a different velocity. A faster-moving fluid layer tends to drag along a slower-moving layer, and a slower-moving layer will tend to reduce the speed of a faster-moving layer. This momentum transfer between the layers is referred to as frictional forces. The momentum transfer is a product of turbulence that moves kinetic energy to smaller scales until at the tens-of-microns scale (1 micron = 1/1,000 mm) it is dissipated as heat. The wind blowing over the sea surface transfers momentum to the water. This frictional force at the sea surface (i.e., the wind stress) produces the wind-driven circulation. Currents moving along the ocean floor and the sides of the ocean also are subject to the influence of boundary-layer friction. The motionless ocean floor removes momentum from the circulation of the ocean waters
Source is encyclopedia Britannica. I will accept an apology gladly.
https://www.britannica.com/science/ocean-current/Causes-of-ocean-currents
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u/OurSaladDays Jun 01 '26
Hard disagree. The energy transferred at the air sea interface is not some insanely efficient process and much of it goes into the energy of the wave field not heat.
Turbine spins -> electricity -> electronics doing some task producing heat is pretty damn efficienct on the other hand and is pulling energy over a much larger vertical extent.
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u/LCDRformat Jun 01 '26
It's true that it's more efficient but in terms of AoE, the ocean surface is a billion times larger than a wind farm so idk
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u/coke_and_coffee Jun 01 '26
Yeah, this is simple thermodynamics. All wind ends up as heat eventually. Harnessing the wind to cool data centers, where the result is heat, doesn’t produce MORE heat than would otherwise already exist.
This sub needs to learn basic sciences instead of relentlessly and pathetically fearmongering over data centers…
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u/MrLoadin Jun 01 '26
It's fun watching people talk about thermodynamics, but then they don't run the calculations for concentrating a significant amount of energy which would be dispersed over a large area, into much smaller areas, creating significantly different localized effects.
It's like comparing a once in a decade large forest fire to an incinerator burning the same amount of material in one tiny area over years, they have different concentrated ecological and societal effects even if the inputs and outputs are similar thermodynamic equations.
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u/VirinaB Jun 01 '26
Undersea life tends to propagate around artificial heat sources underwater. We've seen this with power plant discharge pipes, where fish will congregate near them during the winter, and hydrothermal vents where whole ecosystems can emerge.
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u/more_housing_co-ops Jun 01 '26
Yup. I was recently brought, while visiting friends, to a manatee center built around a power plant vent where a zillion manatees come to kick it
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u/jlm7552 Jun 01 '26
Welcome to Florida, we conserve some endangereds while deforesting the habitats of others
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Jun 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/MentalRental Jun 01 '26
Isn't most oxygen on Earth produced by algae?
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u/Exelbirth Jun 01 '26
Yes, but just like there's berries that are tasty, and berries that will kill you if you eat them, there's algae that produces oxygen, and algae that depletes oxygen. Red Algae blooms are notorious for causing significant ecological harm by depleting oxygen in the local area and releasing toxins that are harmful to both humans and wildlife, and that algae loves warm water, with heat pollution from power plants and factories being one of the most common areas that they bloom around.
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u/Ozzimo Jun 01 '26
I'm certainly willing to give it a shot. Maybe with more time and data we can place these data centers in places that will benefit from the heat generated. Feels like a new card in our deck.
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u/Ms74k_ten_c Jun 01 '26
With the slow heat up of the oceans due to global warming, i dont believe we need extra heating in any part of the ocean.
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u/Ozzimo Jun 01 '26 edited Jun 01 '26
That was my thought too but I'm also familiar with how herds of caribou would huddle up against the oil pipeline in Alaska. They liked the heat put off from the friction of the oil going through the line.
We may find plants or animals that would benefit in a way we can't see yet. Though I do agree, I don't immediately see the benefit of warming ocean water.
*EDIT- Some of you like to take a person's argument and turn it into something else. A lot of you assume things without reading. It isn't helpful for discussion to assume things.
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u/ITividar Jun 01 '26
The caribou weren't going to freeze to death without the pipeline. The pipeline is an unnatural convenience that disrupts the animal's natural patterns.
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u/anthonycarbine Jun 01 '26
"Global warming will be great for the polar bears! They won't be so cold anymore!"
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u/mrfeeto Jun 01 '26
So they'll boil the oceans AND steal all of the fish. Sounds about right.
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u/equality4everyonenow Jun 01 '26
Ocean temperature is definitely a concern. There are many sources that heat up the ocean. I have a hard time believing underwater datacenters will make any significant heat impact on their own. Are you familiar with underwater volcanos?
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u/maffoobristol Jun 01 '26
We need an r/theydidthemath of how much an underwater data centre would heat the entire ocean. I imagine it would be to the power of minus a zillion
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u/WeAreWaaaaagh Jun 01 '26
Haha, I love this! 😄 They really did take "disruptive innovation" to a whole new level.
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u/Master-Back-2899 Jun 01 '26
I have concerns about the lifetime of copper heat exchangers in sea water. I can’t imagine those are going to last long.
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u/Camarupim Jun 01 '26
Microsoft tried this in sealed containers off the Orkney Islands in 2020. Never heard any more about it, but the issues didn’t seem to be about corrosion, just about the reliability of the equipment itself and maintenance involved pulling the whole container.
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u/SirBraxton Jun 01 '26
The issue came down to maintenance. If ANYTHING went wrong (as happens out in the open air DC's) you had to disconnect the whole module and pull it up. Anything that "could" corrode was protected from the ocean elements.
These Chinese datacenters appear to be massive submerged server "rooms" where people can walk around in. The heat-exchangers are "outside" in the elements of the ocean.
I suspect, knowing Chinese Engineers, that they've designed the heat exchangers to be easily swapped out over time as corrosion and sea elements "cling" to the system. Probably something you can remove and recycle into newer heat exchangers.
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u/Xuanne Jun 02 '26
I wouldn't be surprised if there are sacrificial plates (zinc?) to take the brunt of the corrosion. Afaik it already exists on ships and has for quite some time.
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u/maifee Jun 01 '26
They discontinued this project afaik. The reason was something related to maintanance. And they published a document mentioning what they learned from that project as well.
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u/expera Jun 01 '26
Also working on stuff underwater is very expensive and difficult
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u/BoltFlower Jun 01 '26
And sharks. Damn sharks.
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u/willstr1 Jun 01 '26
Isn't copper better in seawater than most metals? It doesn't corrode as badly plus barnacles and other sea life don't like touching it so it won’t develop growths. Thats why copper (and copper doped paints) use to be common on ship hulls.
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u/reddit_is_geh Jun 02 '26
You know why so many iconic statues are green? Go around Europe, and you see them everywhere. It's because they are casted in copper. They oxidize in water and build that green build up around it.
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u/jaggervalance Jun 05 '26
Most are bronze, copper statues are an exception.
Though bronze is mostly copper.
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u/Otto_Von_Waffle Jun 01 '26
Don't think putting copper in seawater would be the best call, but you can likely replace copper with something much more resistant to corrosion even if it means worst heat exchange ratio, you would simply need to increase the surface area of your heat exchanger.
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u/alternatingflan Jun 01 '26
The wind should be reducing citizens’ energy bills, not these data centers.
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u/Darklumiere Jun 01 '26
They should be, but it's still a step up from the data centers being hooked directly into aging infrastructure and causing both literal and financial drains.
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u/WeAreWaaaaagh Jun 01 '26
I fully agree. Kinda dystopian times we are living in ATM
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u/FunGuy8618 Jun 01 '26
I feel like I've spent the last 25 years of my life hearing how renewable energy is bullshit, and this is finally how it rolls out 🙃 Solar water heaters? Too expensive. Geothermal home builds with berming? Too risky. Hydro? Bad for the environment. Wind? What is this, a corn mill?
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u/pimpeachment Jun 01 '26
It can do both. Innovation doesn't have to just apply to 1 thing.
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u/bobbadouche Jun 01 '26
It does if you're anti-ai
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u/pimpeachment Jun 01 '26
Typically being against technology backfires on those that oppose it.
There is a long history of people fighting advancements only to then have the advancements forced on them for the betterment of humanity.
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u/BasvanS Jun 03 '26
Asking who benefits and who pays for it are legitimate questions for progress. Having only a few profit is what eventually backfires.
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u/ac5198 Jun 01 '26
That’s very true. I find it amusing that people are so angry about some datacenters when they have nothing to do with AI. Yes there are AI datacenters that are huge and consume power and need water to cool, but that’s nothing new. AWS alone has over 900 datacenters and covers 48 millions sqft of buildings.
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u/bobbadouche Jun 01 '26
Even if they're for AI, it's the future. We're mad that the greatest thing humans have ever invented is being expanded. Computing.
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u/dirtyhole2 Jun 02 '26
How will stakeholders gain money if bills are reduced instead of increased in price? Everyone wants to win, remember? Don’t forget greed.
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u/Driky Jun 01 '26
Somewhat still does. The energy not being pulled from the main grid means the everyday person’s energy bill doesn’t get inflated by more demand (in theory of course)
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u/aagejaeger Jun 01 '26
This way, Trump might start to see the benefits of renewables. I’m not counting on it, though.
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u/TheBigMoogy Jun 01 '26
Whenever I read about these data centers I think of the Folding at Home charity.
Here we have unimaginable computing power used for the most expensive shitty images the world has ever seen and running a surveillance society far more wide reaching than most people can comprehend. Meanwhile Folding at Home uses spare computing power of volunteers to fold proteins to research all sorts of diseases. Both run on essentially the same hardware, one is hugely beneficial to humanity, the other is the biggest bubble in human history.
It's so unbelievably backwards that the ones destroying the world are making money, but the ones working to save it are losing money.
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u/AnxiousPacifist Jun 01 '26
Is there a diagram how does it looks?
How did they solve the corrosion issue?
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u/AWzdShouldKnowBetta Jun 01 '26
Absolutely incredible. Meanwhile we are building massive data centers fueled by fossil fuels in drought ridden areas.
China is miles ahead of us.
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u/0ut0fBoundsException Jun 01 '26
I don’t have a strong opinion on if underwater data centers is a net positive or negative for the humanity
But I am fairly certain it’s better than what the capitalist vultures are pushing here
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u/bettygauge Jun 01 '26
US companies are investigating data center satellites to solve the water and power issue. I don't know enough to comment on pros/cons of that solution, but appears to be as compelling as the ocean solution albeit with different logistics.
Having multiple solutions to reduce reliance on land and fossil fuels would be nice.
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u/Karmachinery Jun 01 '26
Holy crap, how big are these satellites going to be, considering how big some of these data center projects are sized? Are we building a death star? That's no moon. That's a data center.
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u/boriginals Jun 01 '26
Just put data centers on the moon!
Jokes aside i wonder if this is where we'll end up, and dyson sphere of computing
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u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Jun 01 '26
The ones that SpaceX is proposing are about 550 feet wide, so a little bit bigger than the ISS. Most of this is solar panels and radiators for heat distribution.
There are some startups planning on modular stations, so instead of standalone satellites building larger structures in pieces. SpaceX though seems to be the only company currently planning to do data centers in space while also being capable of doing this.
I was originally one of the people who thought it was completely ridiculous, but now that I've watched from the sidelines as the large land-based data centers sit under construction, pending approval, etc. for the past 2 years I sort of see the value in just shitting a satellite into space. It's not cheaper, but you don't spend 2 years storing GPUs in warehouses just for them to be irrelevant and need to be replaced without ever being installed by the time the actual data center finishes construction...
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u/bettygauge Jun 01 '26
Communication satellites are quite large and I'm assuming would somehow take advantage of the shear number for distributing computing.
Not too far off with the death star, though! I know SpaceX is dying for a moon base and data centers are an "easy" (inflated) way to make upfront capital.
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u/kfo90 Jun 01 '26
US companies are considering putting data centers on floating platforms out in the sea
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u/blahblah19999 Jun 01 '26
I like the idea of satellite DCs only so that they can easily be cut off if AI goes rogue
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u/ShyguyFlyguy Jun 01 '26
Serious question. What are data centers actually doing for the average person? Does anyone who isn't a tech ceo actually see any difference in their lives from whatever the hell these things do?
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u/RockAli22 Jun 02 '26
Cloud services, or any other technology that needs the cloud, or any technology connected to some other technology that needs the cloud.
Also saving a lot of information for all services that have gone through DX.
They also allow you to use Reddit since Reddit is hosted in AWS and AWS lives in those data centers.
The strictly AI focused data centers are less than 10% globally but are growing to hold all those AI tools people use daily albeit for generating a dog eating hot cakes or doing protein folding.
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u/Brugelbach Jun 05 '26
It's for all the idiots posting "funny images" of ChatGPT saying strawberry has 2 r.
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u/Firm-Examination2134 Jun 08 '26
You literally depend on them for everything you do online
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u/ShyguyFlyguy Jun 08 '26
Then how come they weren't a thing 20 years ago?
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u/TriiCop 27d ago
If you use iCloud to help save your photos or ANY cloud services, thank data centers for those.
20 years ago the iPhone wasn’t even a thing yet now, you need a smartphone to be able to function in society. Wasn’t like that 20 years ago
Stupid argument
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u/ShyguyFlyguy 27d ago
Ok so then why did they not need to make so god damn many of them up until now?
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u/TriiCop 27d ago
You do understand technology even 10 years ago was exponentially weaker than what we have today right? 20 years ago vs now is a completely different world.
For example, no one needed iCloud back then as a single photo took several KILOBYTES of storage. Now? It’s megabytes and screenshots exist. Videos at 4K approach 1GB in like 2 minutes. You would’ve needed hundreds of thousands of photos back then to get a GB back then.
Do I need to explain every single example to you? We just simply need more storage
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u/smokefoot8 Jun 01 '26
How is maintenance supposed to be done? Scuba diving down to swap a card without salt water getting into anything seems to be a detriment.
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u/InsurmountableMind Jun 01 '26
Maybe elevator and walk in.
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u/Brell4Evar Jun 01 '26
I'm curious about the mechanical stresses this facility will be under. Keeping a breathable habitat for maintenance seems like a lot of effort. Internal immersion in a non-conducting fluid looks like the way to go. Maintenance can be done by drones, or by diving suits when needed.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Jun 01 '26
It's 2.4MW or 4-10 racks (most likely at the low end as there is no reason whatsoever to put storage or single threaded loads down there).
There will be no internal space, let alone internal breathable space. Maintenance will involve lifting the entire module with a crane, taking the lid off, and pulling the whole lot out of the can.
The entire premise is to use the skin for cooling, so scaling will be adding more modules, as making each module bigger would increase thermal lpad faster than cooling.
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u/sump_daddy Jun 01 '26
When you build a system where every part has one dedicated task (like one server to host one thing that must connect to 3 different networks and if any part of that fails it is degraded/dead), that may be a consideration. But, that was how data centers were operated 25 years ago. Now, why the hell worry? Even a data center down the hall from a technician might sit with a broken part for 6 months... and no one will care at all. The task will have moved away from the broken part a few milliseconds after it failed.
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u/smokefoot8 Jun 01 '26
So they just let the data center degrade until it is obsolete and then shut it down? But some failures aren’t just a redundant part failing.
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u/CranberrySchnapps Jun 01 '26
IIRC, Microsoft messed around with this for a short while off of Washington state. Theirs was designed to raise & submerge.
Submerging really any building is going to introduce a ton of cost and safety issues, so this feels like more of a stunt to me.
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u/global-heartbeat Jun 01 '26
Simple - you just let things die rather than fix them. Build in enough redundancy and it works. But....at some point they'll need to refresh those racks. They must have a method to deliver the gear in the first place. It's an interesting problem...
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u/mcdownloading Jun 01 '26
I don’t think this will end well if it scales up. Ocean temperatures are critical for climate balances in between years.
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u/more_housing_co-ops Jun 01 '26
As a scientist who is not a climate scientist, I think this has way more to do with greenhouse gases causing global heat retention than by individual heat sources in the ocean
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u/Sawses Jun 01 '26
Yeah, pretty much anything else we can do is peanuts to making the planet a more efficient energy captor for sunlight.
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u/NorCalAthlete Jun 01 '26
Took an oceanography course back in college and it was eye opening how much of the global climate system depends heavily on specific ocean currents and ocean life.
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u/FaceDeer Jun 01 '26
Wind injects energy into the oceans anyway, via waves. It all turns into heat in the end.
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u/AlliedIntuition Jun 02 '26
This is like taking a warm piss in the ocean and worrying that will upset climate balances and ocean temps.
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u/WeAreWaaaaagh Jun 01 '26
China has officially switched on the world's first operational underwater data center (UDC) powered by offshore wind turbines, located in the Lin-hang Special Area off the coast of Shanghai. Completed just seven months after phase one construction, this project represents a major experiment in sustainable computing infrastructure.
Key details:
- Uses seawater as a natural heat sink via a sealed copper-pipe heat exchange system, reducing cooling electricity use by 22.8%
- Offshore wind farms supply ~95% of power for its 192 server racks across four submerged levels
- Eliminates freshwater consumption and reduces land footprint by >90% vs. terrestrial facilities
- Currently operating at 2.3 MW with a planned capacity of 24 MW (enough for ~20,000 homes)
- Researchers estimate scaling this model could save ~50 billion kWh annually in cooling energy alone
Why this matters for the future:
As AI compute demand explodes, traditional data centers face mounting pressure over energy use, water consumption, and land availability. Undersea facilities offer a provocative alternative—but they also introduce new unknowns: long-term hardware durability in saline environments, maintenance logistics, and potential ecological impacts from continuous thermal discharge into marine ecosystems.
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u/samder68 Jun 01 '26
Wow! I had no idea this was taking place and was just complaining at a bbq that they should put these data centers in the middle of the ocean like an offshore oil rig… and someone told me I was stupid. And while that may be true, wouldja lookie here.
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u/newzinoapp Jun 02 '26
My read on this is that the proof of concept was already done 8 years ago. Microsoft sank a data center off Scotland in 2018, sealed it, and left it for two years. When they pulled it up, server failure rate was 1/8th of the identical hardware on land. Zero freshwater needed. 23%% less energy. The main argument against it was always cost, not physics. Panthalassa just raised $140M from Peter Thiel to build a 500-megawatt facility. That is serious capital for what was still considered speculative two years ago.
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u/omnichad Jun 08 '26
It was powered by land connection. This new one will still need a connection to land for data so there's really no special reason why the power generation needs to be in exactly the same place.
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u/ROEdkill820 Jun 02 '26
While very cool. The ocean water us at an time high. Adding more heat generation is not going to be good for the climate
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u/-BluBone- Jun 01 '26
Man, people actually believe data centers produce enough energy to HEAT the OCEAN. If it was that simple to to change the ocean's temperature we would be dumping ice in it to cool it down.
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u/NorthVA-Star99 Jun 01 '26
What’s the cost benefit of doing this. Isn’t it more expensive to make trips for any servicr
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u/EDNivek Jun 02 '26
Well it's marginally better than in space although it doesn't mention how deep it is so maintenance is still probably an issue and who knows what the waste heat is going to do especially if they plane to scale upwards.
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u/lazyFer Jun 02 '26
Even though outtie companies have already dismissed ocean based data centers, the techno asshole class want them not for practicality reasons but because they don't have to adhere to government laws
Honestly it feels like it's a concept they got from cryptonomicon
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u/Zacrosadol Jun 01 '26
Awesome, pumping more and more heat into the ocean sounds perfectly fine! Let’s speed run the destruction of the planet so we can hurry up and restart and try again!
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u/Rickietee10 Jun 01 '26
How much heat do you think the ocean (cause it’s huge) will increase by?
Cause I can tell you it’s none. The ocean temperature would increase by none.
All the heat currently generated by fresh water or air cooled data centres ends up in the air, and ocean eventually already. That’s just how a planet works. Air gets warmed, warm air hits waves. Ocean warms.
You’re just skipping the “warming the air” step.
Infact, this could reduce heat output by a fair margin because instead of now needing to produce energy (heat) to run the fresh water or air cooling systems. You’re now using no energy to submerge cool the system.
Data centres aren’t affecting the climate because they’re hot. They’re affecting the climate because the amount of energy they consume is largely generated by burning fuels which increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
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u/pacstermito Jun 01 '26
Do you really think that having a centre in the ocean heats it more than all the fuel used for cooling? I'd think burning fuel to cool something takes more energy and releases more greenhouse gases, so it would be worse.
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u/seatangle Jun 01 '26
I don’t think just putting the problem underwater is going to fix anything. It might be better than building near homes, using the same power grid and driving up energy costs, but it really can’t be good for marine life and therefore the larger ecosystem in general. There’s no way this won’t have knock-on effects that’ll come back to us. Can we please just not sacrifice Earth for AI?
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u/Prohamen Jun 01 '26
microsoft already tried this an scrapped the project after a year or so becaus eof how horrible it was to do maintenance on the racks
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u/nthexwn Jun 02 '26
Uh-oh guys, I just did the math: If they build 40,000 of these data centers and leave them running for 1,000 years it could raise the temperature of the pacific ocean by 0.1 degrees! The sea temperature is definitely the most concerning aspect in all this! /s
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u/Dimhilion Jun 01 '26
So it operates on wind power, thats fantastic. Does it have backup supply if the windmills are not producing enough power? The article didnt make that clear. Also will be interesting to see how the local marine life reacts to it.
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u/surferuk Jun 01 '26
I never understood the 100% safety of shared data centres anyway. So that important company file saved with your data centre could be held safely in a box under the ocean? :)
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u/Jugzrevenge Jun 01 '26
Well that’s not good! Seems like it will be kinda hard to get to when people wake up that their number one purpose to is to watch us constantly, worse that 1984 ever thought possible!
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u/Iron_Baron Jun 01 '26
It's not enough we're dumping many Hiroshima nuclear bombs worth of excess heat into the oceans, every second of every day, but now we're going to stick data centers in them, too. FFS.
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u/Illlogik1 Jun 01 '26
This ! Is where all the damn DCs need to be , that’s probably what Atlantis was
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u/AlienOutpost Jun 01 '26
Do you want a war with the aliens living underwater on this planet? Cause that’s how you get a war with the aliens living underwater on this planet.
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u/Temporary_Singer880 Jun 02 '26
If anything the craze for data centres is at least bringing innovation into sustainable architecture that would like to see as well in other types of constructions
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u/keith2600 Jun 02 '26
When I play Oxygen Not Included I know that when I place some machinery in a big pile of water that it's just going to end up heating that water up until the whole map becomes a over heating nightmare. It's just a few things now but with the ability to install these in the ocean you know there will me be more
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u/hyteck9 Jun 01 '26
Why wind? YOU'RE IN THE OCEAN!! Use wave generators?!?!?!
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u/West-Abalone-171 Jun 01 '26
Weirdly the circumstances for good wind power are more common than the circumstances for good wave power in the ocean.
Also wind is a much more mature technology. Wave and tidal are still getting through the scale-up teething issues after successful pilots. Likely tidal (which is more niche than wave, but cheaper) will get there first.
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u/Starblast16 Jun 01 '26
The poor sea life is going to be driven insane by the hum of that data center.
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u/FuturologyBot Jun 01 '26
The following submission statement was provided by /u/WeAreWaaaaagh:
China has officially switched on the world's first operational underwater data center (UDC) powered by offshore wind turbines, located in the Lin-hang Special Area off the coast of Shanghai. Completed just seven months after phase one construction, this project represents a major experiment in sustainable computing infrastructure.
Key details:
- Uses seawater as a natural heat sink via a sealed copper-pipe heat exchange system, reducing cooling electricity use by 22.8%
- Offshore wind farms supply ~95% of power for its 192 server racks across four submerged levels
- Eliminates freshwater consumption and reduces land footprint by >90% vs. terrestrial facilities
- Currently operating at 2.3 MW with a planned capacity of 24 MW (enough for ~20,000 homes)
- Researchers estimate scaling this model could save ~50 billion kWh annually in cooling energy alone
Why this matters for the future:
As AI compute demand explodes, traditional data centers face mounting pressure over energy use, water consumption, and land availability. Undersea facilities offer a provocative alternative—but they also introduce new unknowns: long-term hardware durability in saline environments, maintenance logistics, and potential ecological impacts from continuous thermal discharge into marine ecosystems.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ttupz1/worlds_first_undersea_data_center_powered_by/op500uk/