So this is how we boil the oceans? With fucking underwater AI data centers. Definitely not on my bingo card
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.
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.
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?
So you are that dumb.
Okay Patrick.
Let’s boil the ocean everyone.
We… We’re already doing that.
Sorry. :/
I didn’t know you’d find out this way.
But now we’re doing it more efficiently!
This makes me wonder what is better - underwater DCs heating the oceans, or above water ones with all the pollution creating and water sucking cooling instead. Part of me thinks the underwater one might be better.
The issue with climate change was never with “heat production”. It’s always been the generation of heat trapping chemicals. The sun sends a stupid amount of energy our way. Generally the earth radiates almost the same amount back out into space, with a minor amount captured by various things, like photosynthesis.
Pollution alters that equation and causes more energy from the sun to get trapped in the atmosphere. That’s the problem. We could never generate as much energy as the sun (even the tiny amount that hits the earth), but we can definitely alter the atmosphere to trap more and more of that heat.
Also, the ocean is a MASSIVE heat sink. I saw someone work out the calculations recently, I don’t remember the numbers, but the conclusion was that we’d never measure a notable increase in ocean temps if we housed every datacentre in existence in the ocean. The sun hitting the ocean every day dumps more energy into the ocean directly than we’d ever be able to manage.
It all comes down to pollution.
If you take local temperatures of the ocean at different latitudes, they won’t all be the mean temperature of the ocean. It isn’t a single massive heat sink.
Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
That’s true, but water is so much more effective at absorbing heat than air, the effect will be negligible. It takes about 4.2 megajoules to raise one cubic meter of water 1 degree C. That energy would raise over 3 cubic KILOMETERS of air 1 degree C.
Even putting data centers at the bottom of large lakes would be unlikely to have an effect. It will not be percetable in the ocean. Regarding temperature anyway, other factors are worth considering.
This is slightly off topic but when our local NPP was operational the lake that they used as heatsink would never freeze over even in the coldest winters. Of course it’s not a huge lake.
I don’t believe they meant it that way. At that scale, literally nothing will be a uniform temperature.
But that’s true no matter where you put the data center. If you have to dump the waste heat somewhere, the high density and specific heat of water is a better heatsink than the air around us.
I wonder how many sq km of data centers it would take to increase the temp of the ocean by 1 degree.
This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don’t think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.
So that’s 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.
Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world’s electricity consumption for 51 years you’d raise the oceans’ temperature by 1°C.
Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you’d be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It’d take about 393 years of the world’s data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.
Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.
So if data centers continue to be built then we’re pretty much lining up another climate apocalypse behind the one we’re currently in.
This really is some great filter shit.
Instead of drilling into the core we’re just going to get boiled alive. Pretty poetic for a garbage system like capalitism.
But … It’s China. It’s not jst capitalism, it’s human greed and fear.
It’s just capitalism.
The only difference is that their capitalism is controlled by the state instead of an international oligarchy of billionaires.
Sure, not like US or Europe.
How long until someone has the idea to put them near already-melting glaciers
Parts of the ocean are colder and several species are having issues locating new spawning grounds.
I remember hearing of a corodile species or something that recovered due to a new power plant discharging warm water.
Overall ocean temps rising is a problem, but the real problem is becoming more uniform temps.
Cold spots are getting warmer. But warm spots are getting colder too. And especially for fish and reptiles. They need warm spots to spawn.
Ecologically speaking this is likely to be a good thing and within a couple years this could be a very important habitat that people are talking about and acting shocked about.
Even tho logically it’s obvious
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not worth it. Don’t care. Burn them all.
Fish soup, coming right up.
So salt water can be used!? 🤔
Computers and electronics love salt water
:Yawn: Worlds first? Microsoft already did this.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
Good for you for reading the article!
The world-first part must be the wind-power thing.
We’ve had small offshore data centers for years, passively cooled but powered by nuclear energy.
(And if you’re still not getting the joke, let’s discuss how a nuke sub would cool its massive computing power. Big boats are like floating data centers; submarines even more advanced. )
Finally we can
piratefish for real RAM!So its like a giant electric kettle filament?
Lol just wait until someone needs to replace something
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.
