The wind energy used would eventually dissipate into heat anyway, this just puts AI in the middle.
In general: all computers turn electricity into heat. After that you get to deal with the heat, which will ironically generate even more heat (fans, pumps, etc.). This is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). A shitty datacenter might spend over 30% of the energy on cooling. Of course, any compute will end up heating up things, so moving the heat away efficiently is a huge deal.
I think dunkin a datacenter in water and powering it with wind is probably about as energy efficient as you can possibly get without moving into heat reuse (which we should):
Sea water is cold, so the temperature differential is large. This means efficient and cheap heat transfer.
Sea water moves, so you don’t need to actively pump it away or rely on convection to move the heat away.
Now, the more efficient way to deal with this is that modern liquid cooled hardware can go rather hot. Hot enough to do something with the waste heat. We can heat a campus, contribute to district cooling, etc. This is of course mostly relevant in cold climates, and often only during winter.
This design is probably a reasonably good idea from an energy efficiency standpoint. From an ecological standpoint, probably not, but I’m not qualified to answer that question.
We should do something better with our limited resources than generating AI-slop, but there are plenty of other more legitimate compute uses (like climate research) that could benefit from similar setups.
They’re using the ocean to cool the computers. This heats the water.
The wind energy used would eventually dissipate into heat anyway, this just puts AI in the middle.
In general: all computers turn electricity into heat. After that you get to deal with the heat, which will ironically generate even more heat (fans, pumps, etc.). This is Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). A shitty datacenter might spend over 30% of the energy on cooling. Of course, any compute will end up heating up things, so moving the heat away efficiently is a huge deal.
I think dunkin a datacenter in water and powering it with wind is probably about as energy efficient as you can possibly get without moving into heat reuse (which we should):
Now, the more efficient way to deal with this is that modern liquid cooled hardware can go rather hot. Hot enough to do something with the waste heat. We can heat a campus, contribute to district cooling, etc. This is of course mostly relevant in cold climates, and often only during winter.
This design is probably a reasonably good idea from an energy efficiency standpoint. From an ecological standpoint, probably not, but I’m not qualified to answer that question.
We should do something better with our limited resources than generating AI-slop, but there are plenty of other more legitimate compute uses (like climate research) that could benefit from similar setups.
Okay Patrick