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Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea
- heyjstn 2mo agoWhy the website and the images look like AI-generated?
- iancutzul 2mo agobecause they are :))
- highvoltageguy 2mo agoWith the current capabilities of drone warfare is literally putting ecological bombs near to the shores. Awesome!
- JodieBenitez 2mo agoI thought the same... huge security risks (or huge security costs ?).
- avens19 2mo agoHow do they handle rough seas?
- imglorp 2mo agoTranslation: they won't let us build datcenters on land because we screw things up too much there. And we can't afford space. So we'll do it at sea where we can run all the gas turbines we want and wreck the Earth from there.
- fulafel 2mo ago"Gas today, nuclear tomorrow" in the power section, with a LNG tanker docked to it.
- Hamuko 2mo agoI think the word "today" in that phrase is extremely generous.
- fluxflexer 2mo agoWhat's the benefit from using an off shore platform against building them on the beach and using pipes for cooling?
- antonvs 2mo agoZoning laws and jurisdiction, perhaps.
- cryo32 2mo agoAvoiding legal jurisdiction, regulation and tax by being offshore. Bring on the exploding drone boats.
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo agoYou also lose the protections given by legal jurisdictions. Also regulation and tax by being offshore have much easier ways to be bypassed and which are already being done effectively so by utilizing already existing legal structures and jurisdictions I think.
- sschueller 2mo agoSealand[1] is becoming attractive real estate again... [1] https://sealandgov.org/ https://sealandgov.org/
- LargoLasskhyfv 2mo agoNaa. That's just too rotten. Deep cons need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condeep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condeep
- beloch 2mo agoThis reminds me of the Pangeos megayacht from a few years back. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pangeos-terayacht-turtle/ https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pangeos-terayacht-turtle/ TL;DR: Pangeos was a concept for a floating free city that trended a few years back, but was never built for obvious reasons, just like how these floating data centres will never be built. Presumably some people were bilked into paying money to the Pangeos scammers, just like there will be those who "invest" in this. The problem is that it costs a lot more to put a nuclear reactor into a permanently sea-worthy form-factor than it does to build on land and put up with some pesky taxes. There are plenty of places with lax regulations (environmental and otherwise) that will be happy to let you build whatever size data centre you want if you're willing to build the power generation too.
- tatersolid 2mo agoCurrent nuclear-powered ships are run by the world’s premier naval powers and protected by their own stealth or a huge array of armed escort ships. Have these guys factored in the cost of a task force of protective missile frigates, subs, and destroyers at each site?
- preisschild 2mo agoWhy would a carrier battle group be a prerequisite for this? Capital ships will have escorts anyways, the propulsion system doesn't matter.
- cbg0 2mo agoThat's a problem for the future, no need to worry investors with these silly questions.
- Iolaum 2mo agoHey if you can externalize that cost, more money left for you and the investors !!!
- citrin_ru 2mo agoI doubt Russian nuclear ice breakers have naval escort. Until recently they operated within the coverage of on-shore long range SAM systems (but most of these SAM systems were moved elsewhere recently e.g. to protect oil refineries so Northern Sea Route is no longer protected).
- joshuanapoli 2mo agoI don’t think that anyone would want to steal an icebreaker, but a datacenter full of valuable equipment and interesting information is a more likely target.
- Fluorescence 2mo agoWould a marine raid by ship be lower risk than a smash and grab by panel-van on land? I imagine land is a lower bar to entry, accessible to a much larger criminal base, but security response times and road surveillance is tough. I'm too much of a land-lubber to know how easy it is vanish from a coastal crime scene by ship. The sea... nowhere to hide but very big. Can satellites track you these days? If wanting to nab a container or two that's a big ship. Not much you could put in a minisub or sub-surface thing. A James Bond villain could cut the supports and drag the whole thing to the hollowed out mountain of their island lair. I need Michael Mann to make "Heat but on a boat" to educate me.
- rtmkrptn 2mo ago[dead]
- davidricodias 2mo agoAccident waiting to happen... who's gonna insurance these facilities?
- sdoering 2mo agoPrivatize the earnings, socialize the risk. The neoliberal dream.
- UnfitFootprint 2mo agoGenuinely, have these guys done anything other than AI generated ship pictures? The top down ones look like they didn’t even use a good model. I’d be stunned if anyone takes this seriously
- forgottentea 2mo agoThere are some very stupid VC folks around. I have spoken to some, and watched them shart millions away on the back of a powerpoint and some stage presence
- alansaber 2mo agoStupid is uncharitable. They lock into the small picture, like some details about it, and get carried away. Then again, it's their job to get carried away.
- voakbasda 2mo agoHow do I get in front of these people? I have legit business ideas, and it’s frustrating to hear how easy it is to get VC money. I want a piece of that cake.
- emifo3 2mo agoSo Much land. Even non civilized lands, Even near sea for piping water. What does this idea solve? Or just adds problems like, Non secure assets/nucclear on the sea.
- getmoheb 2mo agofreedom from laws
- vincnetas 2mo agoYou can not move datacenter built on land. But you can tow this datacenter to new direction if needed. Just like "Howl's Moving Castle" :)
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo agoIf this is just designed for AI economics. The end output of these datacenters are the tokens which are mostly relatively really small data and is not sensitive to latency.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo ago> What does this idea solve? The obvious answer is NIMBYs.
- bjord 2mo agowho's ready for gpu piracy?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Faaak 2mo agoSure, lets heat up the oceans even more. The sensible way would be to use the waste heat for district heating, but let's heat the fish instead
- pbmonster 2mo agoIt's a drop in a bucket. Global warming is due to ~5e18 Wh of excess heating. A nuke dumping 5e12 Wh of additional heat into water makes no difference at all.
- goodpoint 2mo agoDrops add up, just like using gas, oil, coal...
- fc417fc802 2mo agoNo, they really don't in this case. IIRC a sustained gigawatt of output over a 24 hour period is roughly equivalent to the sunlight absorbed by a 5 square kilometer patch of ocean in the tropics over the same period of time. The oceans absorb an almost incomprehensible amount of solar energy on a daily basis.
- noosphr 2mo agoI ran the numbers for this about six months ago and it works out a lot better than all the other alternatives. The fact you're surrounded by coolant, can use intrinsically safe versions of high pressure reactors and have low latency between multiple markets with one datacenter is a big plus. That you're not competing with humans for electricity or water is another. That said you'd want to build a semi submersible platform with the nuclear reactors in the pontoons and the superstructure able to house container based datacenter units. The only place with enough experience to build these is South Korea which isn't a deal breaker per se, but Samsung can pretty much eat your lunch if these get successful.
- mjhay 2mo agoSo I take it you’re a marine engineer or similar?
- noosphr 2mo agoNo, but I did have my father check the maths and he built oil rigs for 30 years.
- citadel_melon 2mo agoCan you share your work? Trust but verify
- noosphr 2mo agoIf you'd like to buy the report drop an email on my profile to talk about price.
- formvoltron 2mo agoWrite up an ai generated biz plan, shop it around quick. make the necessary human pyramid, get it on the stock market. it'll be as irresistible as peanut butter & chocolate. (ai+nuclear.. with a dollop of cheaper than spacex AI buildout). Doesn't matter than solar+batteries might be a BIT safer. (even goat Elon has said we don't need nuclear as we already have a free one that is at a safe distance)
- lgl 2mo agoYCombinator S26? Guys, guys, guys... so hear me out - remember last month when we were all giddy about datacenters in space? Well, apparently investors weren't too keen on that idea so we've come up with something much better: Nuclear datacenters at sea! Now this is truly a visionary proposition that will certainly become another unicorn and have no issues whatsoever.
- trencedamp 2mo agoWhy not fusion powered data centers on the moon?
- sgt 2mo agoWe just need to solve the issue of fine moon dust in those computer fan bearings /s
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- st_goliath 2mo agoUp next: nuclear data center Zeppelins in the cloud! Innovative new air cooling: instead of using lots of tiny fans to move air through the servers, we simply use 2 big fans to move the servers through the air! And while we're at it, we'll completely disrupt the existing Zeppelin market that depends on expensive helium for some reason. We use daring, innovative hydrogen technology, enabling a massive cost reduction!
- 2PqboPPmKegvanx 2mo agothe term zeppelins needs to be used more often. love this idea, where do i mail my money to invest!!!!!
- lgl 2mo agoThis is future technology my friend. They only accept payments in crypto, tulips or SpaceX stock.
- throwawayffffas 2mo agoHow do they deal with saltwater corrosion, do the barges go in drydocks after a couple of years? What about weather do they have their own propulsion do they need to be towed to avoid bad weather? Can't you put the same gear in containers next to the shore and avoid the whole weather issue?
- V__ 2mo agoThe question now becomes: Will the AI bubble pop before we get sea datacenters?
- Theodores 2mo agoWasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling? What happened to that? Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark. As of yet I have not seen the use of server racks as structural architectural features. They always seem to need a vast shed that has its own supports, when server racks could also be the walls and supports for much of the building, or some other structure, maybe a road bridge.
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo agoThe price of Datacenter are the AI chips but the bottleneck in creation of them is power, given how much power exhaustive they are (and rightfully so) people protesting against it because its them who pays the price. That being said, the shipping container idea is decent but the bottleneck is still power not so much cooling, so unless someone figures out a way to have an actual nuclear power reactor, there are issues. Also oh the issue isn't that there aren't nuclear power reactors but that they aren't large enough. Some nuclear powered datacenters exist in some experimental settngs but these new Datacenters are trying to take a magnitude more and they can't wait for the production of those things and further research.
- 2PqboPPmKegvanx 2mo ago>Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling Project Natnick! It was a success, the research concluded and it is no longer active. Article: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/ https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr... Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick In June, China opened a $236 M wind powered underwater data center. Article references another commercial underwater data center they opened in 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/china-opens-worlds-first-wind-powered-underwater-data-center/ https://www.wired.com/story/china-opens-worlds-first-wind-po...
- 2mo ago
- gmuslera 2mo agoWhat about (extreme) weather? The nice pictures looks like being in open sea, and there big storms may have an expensive impact if not everything is taken into account.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- danofsteel32 2mo agoThis is a really ambitious and difficult idea. It would be awesome if they can pull it off! Since most people live near a coast this could power more than just data centers.
- simoncrosby1 2mo agoSee panthalassa as an alternative
- tavavex 2mo agoAm I the one who's out of touch, or is this absolutely insane? Let me summarize the state of the AI black hole right now: Data centers! Everyone wants more data centers! But how do I get in on the craze? I think the brightest investors of our generation are hungry for data centers placed in weird places. Space data centers, underwater data centers, data centers in the Earth's core and on a space elevator! I got it - sea data centers! Now, to make this idea not sound crazy, we'll just pretend there's literally not a single shred of buildable land on the entire planet. So now we've established that land data centers suck, all we need to do is to figure out the easy parts, such as shipbuilding, propulsion, creating our own power grid (no worries, we'll just pretend that designing, building, maintaining and scaling a state of the art nuclear reactor at sea is easier than building a power line on land or even just constructing a normal land power plant), repairs, staffing, scaling construction (got to make building ships cheaper than a warehouse) and about a billion other things. I think we'll just try to think of the smallest numbers we can, no one will check. Oh, and since that nuclear thing is so hard, we'll actually just get tons of fossil fuels instead and pollute away in international waters, we promise we'll switch to that miracle nuclear mega reactor we're building! Now all that's left is to AI generate us some text, AI generate some images, AI generate us a website and that's it! YC26 baby! Did I get that right? This is like investing into a perpetual motion machine on Kickstarter level crazy. Am I still living on the same planet?
- subpixel 2mo agoI think you left off figuring out how to connect a floating data center to the internet without making that aspect as expensive as powering the thing in the first place.
- fc417fc802 2mo agoI think that's actually the easiest part of this entire thing? Assuming you're anchored you just dangle a subsea cable directly underneath the platform. Note that there are already some pilot ocean based datacenter projects. The most recent one I'm aware of is attached to nearshore wind. I have to imagine that makes far more sense than floating a civilian nuclear reactor on the high seas.
- popPopBoom 2mo ago[flagged]
- class3shock 2mo agoThe one thing I enjoy about our AI goldrush driven economy is all the cartoonish cash grabs coming out of the woodwork to try and part investors from their money. 1. 4-5x faster deployment than on land - Not that this will ever be built but if it were, I assume Newport News or Electric Boat would be fitting the nuclear reactor (unless they cheap out and go with an import). Given they are booked solid until the 2040s somehow this company is even slower than the nuclear industry at building land based plants. 2. 1.5 GW deployed per year - Starting in which year? 3. 1.1 PUE seawater cooling, modeled. - Well there you have it, they modeled it, so it's basically already built. 4. 20-40 year infrastructure life - Remind me how many 20 year old servers are currently running AI workloads? Oh, I guess that just means the ships and the nuclear reactor. I mean I guess that's good, it's not like a building on land would last that long... Oh but I guess they will just be using LNG to start with, thank goodness that is alot easier to get than nuclear. In fact now is a really good time to start this as I heard there's some companies looking to offload a few LNG tankers somewhere in the gulf for a steal!
- voakbasda 2mo agoI wonder if the business model is to operate on the high seas, where sanctions do not apply….
- class3shock 2mo agoI'm not sure what sanctions you are thinking about but generally if you want to be beyond the legal reach of a nation state or group of nation states, you just set up a server in a different nation state that doesn't enforce the laws you want to avoid.