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Microsoft Confirms the Closure of Its Underwater Data Center
- duxup 1y agoCouldn't you get the cooling of the ocean from just pumping water through pipes in the ocean and then onto land? And if nitrogen was a big benefit, couldn't you do that on land too? Not knocking the experiment, it seems very interesting / worth seeing what happens.
- Bluestein 1y agoI am sure this has got to have been tried before ... (Then again, pumping the water would consume some energy ...)
- more_corn 1y agoYeah Google built a data center in an old paper mill in Norway. They use ocean water to cool the heat exchangers. It’s important not to let the salt water in. Things get a lot more difficult then.
- duxup 1y agoI suspect it is similar underwater ;)
- yencabulator 1y agoNot sure if they built one in Norway too, but you might mean Finland. https://medium.com/@henrihapponen/the-coolest-data-center-in-the-world-e288cb19d921 https://medium.com/@henrihapponen/the-coolest-data-center-in...
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- bawana 1y agoI wonder if they can use the same cooling tower for their nuclear plant and their data center? Colocating fission reactors and datacenters might be a way to get some use out of all those empty malls resulting from amazonification.
- Bluestein 1y agoThis should become industry standard. Well thought out.-
- dublin 1y agoHacker News is getting really useless. I thought I'd heard this some time ago, and yep, clicking through,this is indeed "news" that is OVER A YEAR OLD. Are we just completely ignoring the "News" part of Hacker News now?
- stevage 1y agoGood that this didn't become a trend. Oceans warming is one of the huge threats of climate change, we really don't need to help it.
- 2four2 1y agoA data center is a near-zero contribution to ocean warming.
- stevage 1y agoYou know if you add enough small things together, they become a big thing, right?
- kristjansson 1y agoYou're not wrong, but not all values of big are equivalent. e.g. volume of the worlds oceans is ~1e21 L and annual global energy production is ~3e16 Wh = ~1e20 J 1e20/(1e21*4e3) = 0.000025 ΔC So even all world's energy production dumped into the ocean as waste heat is a minuscule direct effect. It's all in the second order effects of generating that energy...
- stevage 1y agoWhat about the local effects of raising water temperature? (In the scenario where a large number of underwater data centers were built near each other)
- asacrowflies 1y agoIt's generally bad and kills local eco system with algae blooms and messing up seasonal cycles of nutrients/food. But that's just with dumping the heat into environment especially in freshwater river based reactors and a pretty raw system of dumping hot water into the river ... Clever use of physics and cooling towers allows us to mitigate the problem..release the energy slowly over time or use the thermal for something else.but costs a lot more than just dumping it into ocean and doing lazy misleading napkin math.
- greatgib 1y agoProject Natick was a successful proof-of-concept, but now it's time for Microsoft to move on. Corp-speak for a failure. If it was good, you would not stop it (after only 2 years) or not go on with the project in a visible way. What I guess is that the thing was ok in terms of not being a giant disaster but it did not have any added value compared to a land based équivalent and the external factors costs like maintenance on the server, operating and monitoring the container, ... were terrible compared to a normal datacenter.