Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea(atomarine.co) |
Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea(atomarine.co) |
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.
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!
As many countries are now trying to suggest, bring your own power and we are happy.
So in that sense, Nuclear? sure, already being tried but not fast or big enough right now.
Sea? I don't think so. You literally get into murky waters on the future of the project and this part feels really hype based, atleast to me.
Perhaps some people feel that Sea could cool things off but in my understanding, if you already have nuclear, it would be better building Datacenters in colder stranded regions then to have really effective temperature/natural cooling.
Power is the core issue, Everything else is bolted on top of it in my opinion.
Have these guys factored in the cost of a task force of protective missile frigates, subs, and destroyers at each site?
I wouldn’t touch civil maritime nuclear with a barge pole, and if I did, the clear win is decarbonizing big cargo ships.
But the people championing nuclear data centers are not trying to solve climate change
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.
The sensible way would be to use the waste heat for district heating, but let's heat the fish instead
Bring on the exploding drone boats.
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.
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.
I’d be stunned if anyone takes this seriously
The obvious answer is NIMBYs.
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.
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.
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.