this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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I wonder if they could use sea water for that. I know salt is corrosive, but surely there's a reasonable solution there.
seawater would probably corrode whatever storage system they have in there overtime, all that biological material, chemicals and gunk.
Sure. A lot of that can be filtered out, but there will be corrosion with whatever heat transfer system they use. However, seawater is free, pretty consistently cool temperature (esp. in the Pacific), and is plentiful, so replacing some heat exchange components shouldn't be overly burdensome.
I remember there was talks about a floating data center in the ocean.
I'd much rather have underwater data centers. A floating data center seems like a massive eyesore and you'd need to run cables out there.
If you build one underground near the shore and then channel water in from the ocean, it should be much less intrusive.
It still has problems. Mainly you need to get power out there and the heated exhaust water can mess with the ecosystem.
Right, by "near the shore" I meant a land-based facility with access to sea water. Heated exhaust water could also be used in a local desalinization plant to produce fresh water for maximum efficiency.
It's not like they're dunking the electronics in the water. They just need to filter it enough it doesn't clog up the system and run it in a closed loop.
If I can have a closed loop with a reservoir for my home PC, motherfucking Amazon can build a water storage tank for their cooling.
But that would require large capital investments that negatively impacts earnings reports.
Much better to screw over the people by taking their water for free.
Sure, but that means more space to allow for cooling the water so it can be reused. If you can cycle it w/ "unlimited" cool water from the ocean, it can be a lot more compact, and heated waste water could potentially be used by a desalinization plant to improve freshwater output.
Nuclear plants do that with lakes, they suck in cool water from one end and dump out the hot water at the other so that it can cool down by the time it circulates back in