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Who else foresees environmental problems with this later down the line? (news.microsoft.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Microsoft are looking at putting datacenters under the ocean, which sounds like a really good idea to cool them but I can’t help but think a couple decades from now it’s going to start causing us problems

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Now you're talkin!

At the deployment site, a remotely operated vehicle retrieved a cable containing the fiber optic and power wiring from the seafloor and brought it to the surface where it was checked and attached to the datacenter, and the datacenter powered on.

Sadly, it sounds like power is coming from the shore.

Underwater datacenters could also serve as anchor tenants for marine renewable energy such as offshore wind farms or banks of tidal turbines, allowing the two industries to evolve in lockstep.

But I think this is their plan for energy in the future.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Onshore, wind turbines sprout from farmers’ rolling fields and solar panels adorn roofs of centuries-old homes, generating more than enough electricity to supply the islands’ 10,000 residents with 100 percent renewable energy. A cable from the Orkney Island grid sends electricity to the datacenter, which requires just under a quarter of a megawatt of power when operating at full capacity.

It's still pretty darn clean.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's not clean at all. You're burying disposable hardware into extremely corrosive salt water and then throwing away the whole thing when it fails. What the fuck is green about that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

All hardware is "disposable" in the sense that it becomes obsolete after a few years, and the electricity to keep using it costs more than replacing it with new hardware with better performance per watt.

Maybe once Moore's law is finally dead and buried that'll stop being the case, but it hasn't happened quite yet.

This certainly isn't "green" in terms of disposal, but I'm not sure it's any worse than the status quo alternative of a landfill, either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

But we recycle e-waste. You're not recycling shit that's been corroded by the ocean. It's ruined, not just obsolete. We already have fully-renewable data-centers. This just makes more problems than it solves which is why there's been no update to this article from 2018.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

But we recycle e-waste.

Oh you sweet, summer child.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The thought of these plus tidal generators makes my day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah, the Orkney Islands are also experimenting with tidal generators (Wikipedia/European Marine Energy Centre), though the weather there is ideal for wind energy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I can't wait to reserve some compute time for when the ocean data center is getting wind power.