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China: "We will use the oceans water". usa: "We will use the citizens drinking water".
How many AI datacenters will it take to boil the ocean?
It would probably take more energy than we can harvest on earth, considering the sunlight and geothermal energy doesn't boil it currently.
I could see it affecting the temperature on local scales, such as the area immediately around the data center.
There are a number of 6-8GWe nuclear plants that dump 15+GW into the nearby sea (or in the case of Bruce, into Lake Huron). I don't see it being much of an issue. Better than virtually any other cooling option.
The issues are maintenance, energy source, and equipment supply.
The plants on the lakes so monitor the water temp so they don't affect the ecosystem during the warmer seasons still.
But I doubt the one in NB had to worry about that when more water flows by it than all the rivers in the world combined.
But yes, much better source of cooling at the cost of maintenance and equipment. Just like tidal power but with fewer moving parts.
Well, if the energy comes from solar on the thingy, then it's probably going to cool the ocean, could be similar with wind.
That's a good point. Maybe not cool, but it would warm the water less.
(I'm guessing solar cells reflect less energy back into space than water, since they're specifically designed not to.)
40...2...ob..viously...
sudo systemctl poweroff
OH FUCK I was in an ssh session!
*Puts on scuba gear
They built the whole thing? Did nobody warn them there's no wind underwater?
Tides are the wind of the water
This is pretty impressive. If only China had a good human rights record. But then again there's only a few countries that do and none of them are superpowers.
So there's a non-zero chance we will find out later that it's just a bathysphere full of children doing math.
But then again there's only a few countries that do and none of them are superpowers.
Really? Which ones?
I wonder how cost effective this will be in the long run considering how much they'll have to deal with corrosion. I imagine the maintenance will become pretty overwhelming in a year or two.
I'd really like to know how they handle all the small-scale HW issues. As a DC tech, I'm kept quite busy with those
There was an Intel experiment a while back where they left a bunch of racks in the parking lot. They found that the failure rate wasn't much higher than inside, and not needing a data center building saved money. Maybe this project just accepts the eventual failure of components.
They’re probably stacks of 8x NPU Huawei servers all cooperatively serving the same few models.
As an older example, I believe Deepseek V3 was most optimally served with ~384 GPUs in a single cluster, before they switched to Chinese NPUs. So they’d have some software that ties all these together as one “server” and maybe multiple of those all serving API requests for one endpoint.
But it doesn’t actually need all 384 in each server. Many models will fit in a single 8-GPU/NPU server, but the software pools more just to try and utilize the hardware better.
If one server fails, the system would return a few requests as empty and have to restart the serving software, but… that’s fine. All the data is ephemeral. Even if the whole 24MW unit fails, they can just route API requests somewhere else, and a few failed generations isn’t a big deal.
I bet they duplicate everything and just switch off faulty units. Every year or so, they would emerge the whole thing and replace what they need at a large scale.
Sounds expensive. I'm betting they just abandon it and sink a new one with new, faster hardware.
Probably have diver it techs.. boy that's kind of cool
It's amazing what can be accomplished with financial motivation
Wouldn't maintenance be a lot easier if they just placed it near the sea and pumped the water through from there? Or used a heat exchanger. All water going in is sent back out at a higher temperature.
By placing the heat sinks directly into the water there's no electricity needed for a pump, and tides, weather, and heat convection will move the water around.
Having the entire facility underwater also means less exposure to the elements.
Saltwater is one of the harshest terrestrial environments for a data center other than maybe lava. Pressure, oxygen, and sodium ions make the ocean extremely corrosive to metal structures.
You could be right about the first part, but I take issue with the second. Ships in seawater usually need sacrificial anodes so corrosion eats those instead of the hull and fasteners. I'm not sure how that would affect heat exchange, maintenance, or long-term reliability. It would definitely limit the materials you could use.
You know that those sacrificial anodes are simply zinc, right? One of the most plentiful metals on the planet?
Why would anyone on earth not make those simply swappable, like on boat motors, and on ocean going vessels.
We have been building ocean going vessels out of metal for over a century now. I think those so-called engineering challenges are solved.
Ever notice that the vast majority of oxidation actually occurs ABOVE the waterline?
Care to guess why?
Here's a hint, look at the first 3 letters of the word "oxidation."
Edit to add: Plus there's different metal choices for the actual heat exchangers, such as stainless 2507 or even titanium, which is extremely resistant to such corrosion, and for the parts of the building that do not need heat exchange, an insulating coating will mitigate nearly all oxidation issues.
First off, there's no need to be that combative. Second,
Here's a hint, look at the first 3 letters of the word "oxidation."
There's plenty of oxygen dissolved in water.
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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