So this is how we boil the oceans? With fucking underwater AI data centers. Definitely not on my bingo card
No? It’s powered by wind energy. Wind is created by heat from the sun. If you capture and use the energy or not it still stays in earth’s system. This is about as green as computing can get.
Hmm so the sun is chucking a bunch of heat into the earth right, what is happening to that heat? Why not get some use out of that energy before it radiates away into space? This is a good thing, yes bad things exist, but this one is good.
Either I’m misunderstanding you, or you’re misunderstanding the situation. They are not pulling heat from the ocean, they are adding to it. And unfortunately that heat is doing a bad job of raidiating into space.
In thermodynamics, this is the heat goes in, heat goes out. Also temperature higher, more heat goes out.
And CovfefeKills is right. Heat from the sun is orders of magnitude higher than a little bitty data centre. And that heat gets re-radiated to space. It’s all balanced. Except for when you put more heat absorbing gases into the atmosphere which include increasing levels of evaporating water. All to power and cool current data centres.
The Earth is constantly bombarded by the sun, why doesn’t the Earth just continuously heat up? Because it radiates heat away into space. So heat itself isn’t the problem okay It just goes off into space. The problems come from the balance of absorded energy vs. radiated energy which is why oil is such a bad thing at such a large scale, it’s ancient sun energy that can’t be radiated fast enough. And fucking with our enviroment and atmosphere which has degraded the ability to radiate energy.
Taking daily solar wind energy and converting it into heat energy in the ocean itself is no problem, the problem is if the ocean cannot radiate away that heat due to fucking with the atmosphere. And by taking more solar energy and converting it to useful energy we reduce the amount of fucking with the atmosphere. It’s a good thing.
They’re using the ocean to cool the computers. This heats the water.
The wind energy used would eventually dissipate into heat anyway, this just puts AI in the middle.
In general: all computers turn electricity into heat. After that you get to deal with the heat, which will ironically generate even more heat (fans, pumps, etc.). This is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). A shitty datacenter might spend over 30% of the energy on cooling. Of course, any compute will end up heating up things, so moving the heat away efficiently is a huge deal.
I think dunkin a datacenter in water and powering it with wind is probably about as energy efficient as you can possibly get without moving into heat reuse (which we should):
- Sea water is cold, so the temperature differential is large. This means efficient and cheap heat transfer.
- Sea water moves, so you don’t need to actively pump it away or rely on convection to move the heat away.
Now, the more efficient way to deal with this is that modern liquid cooled hardware can go rather hot. Hot enough to do something with the waste heat. We can heat a campus, contribute to district cooling, etc. This is of course mostly relevant in cold climates, and often only during winter.
This design is probably a reasonably good idea from an energy efficiency standpoint. From an ecological standpoint, probably not, but I’m not qualified to answer that question.
We should do something better with our limited resources than generating AI-slop, but there are plenty of other more legitimate compute uses (like climate research) that could benefit from similar setups.
Okay Patrick
I think you got downvoted because of the misunderstanding of the heat you are referring to which is heat = wind power and light = solar power
I am terrible at explaining things and probably deserve the downvotes. If I thought they mattered I might try harder.
But I have noticed if you gap some context the Fediverse/Lemmy exposes itself. So in this instance the they need to be spoon fed “energy is energy” yea no thanks. This stopped being about changing their opinion and instead about reinforcing to myself that these NPC’s cannot be allowed to inform my opinion.
You say you’re bad at explaining things, but I think you did a decent job explaining Lemmy culture. If you go against certain dogma — even if you’re right — you’ll catch a lot of unexplained, seemingly-irrational, downvotes.
I’m not much of a social media guy, so when I first joined Lemmy, I found this confusing. I suppose I still do, but I just accept it and move on. That’s just how it is here.
I’d bet that this comment will be mostly downvoted. However, after posting it, I will spend exactly zero seconds worrying or wondering about it 🙂
Some also hate my explanation too, they probably think if you put heat into water, it stays there for perpetuity.
Deserts are a great example of what happens when there’s barely any (greenhouse gas) water in the atmosphere.
I wonder what “wind powered” means?
Oh are you confused because you didn’t know all energy is from the sun? Yea the wind is powered by the sun fun right?
Geothermal energy isn’t from the sun
…nor are fossil fuels derived from chemoautotrophic biomes…
Yea I could have been more specific.
So you are that dumb.
Okay Patrick.
Yeah, great because ocean habitat already straining from warming oceans are going to love having AI that produces nothing but hallucinations and pron heat up the waters even more.
What will this do to the local ocean ecosystems?
China doesn’t care. The US doesn’t care.
People care… But who are we? What do we matter?
I think the dissipation must be extremely efficient. They might have instruments in place to monitor the effects (?) but I’d say the water temperature must be that of the surrouding ocean,… at worst something like 1m away from the radiators? I’m not a physicist. Perhaps the heightened temperature can even provide a hook of sorts for some species? like a weak hydrothermal vent? could be interesting to study.
In any case, the one thing that’s going to tear us apart is water availability. I think it’s smart to do away with that requirement for a data center.
Great, let’s boil the ocean faster.
Okay, who had the bright idea of boiling the ocean to make soup?
God, the insane amount of energy it would take to even remotely measure a difference in the ocean water is astronomical. You might be able to cause some small impact in a relatively small radius that could impact wildlife, but I feel like there are open enough areas that not much would be impacted in the area.
Computers and electronics love salt water
There is a complex system of tubes
Still, FUCK AI.
Don’t you see? This is what we needed, a way for AI to fuck over fish too.
So when do we start putting big ice cubes in the ocean?
(Really this at least makes more sense then land slop centers, still silly)
they might move them to antartica or the artic.
Fish soup, coming right up.
So salt water can be used!? 🤔
If you have access to it. Unfortunately, most of them are setting up in drought ridden deserts. They’ll be fighting Nestlé for the last drops pretty quickly.
You can also just use air
I hope it fucken sinks
Why?
AI is why.
It has its uses. The way it’s being pushed is a different issue entirely.
Oh, well, those AI companies have been struggling to find a practical use case, so maybe you should present a pitch to them if you’re so confident in its uses, you could be worth billions!
The use case is simple. AI coding assistance. There’s a reason why Anthropic focuses almost entirely on code. Full on vibe coding is bad, but as an assistant it’s great.
maybe you should present a pitch to them if you’re so confident
They already know. The problem is they’ve sunk so much money into it already, that they’re literally hoping there will be some breakthrough that justifies all the money.
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I gotta know. Do you know what a use case is? I’ll give you a hint; it’s not the same as a use.
Lol, what? Was that even English? I mean, I know those were English words, but you tried so hard to make a bad counterpoint work that you kinda broke the language there a bit.
Not worth it. Don’t care. Burn them all.
Hasnt microsoft been doing offshore datacenters for nearly 15 years? The one off the shore of the UK was almost certainly majority wind powered.
So its like a giant electric kettle filament?
Lol just wait until someone needs to replace something
The ocean is already warming, and these guys want to heat it up even more? Didn’t these guys watch Day After Tomorrow? Because this is how we start a new ice age.
