Yeah, great because ocean habitat already straining from warming oceans are going to love having AI that produces nothing but hallucinations and pron heat up the waters even more.
Computers and electronics love salt water
Wind-powered datacentre that uses less energy overall and doesn’t consume drinking water.
Technology advancing in all the different domains that make this a viable solution are a good thing. Everyone can calm down with their emotional takes.
So salt water can be used!? 🤔
Fish soup, coming right up.
So this is how we boil the oceans? With fucking underwater AI data centers. Definitely not on my bingo card
Hmm so the sun is chucking a bunch of heat into the earth right, what is happening to that heat? Why not get some use out of that energy before it radiates away into space? This is a good thing, yes bad things exist, but this one is good.
I think you got downvoted because of the misunderstanding of the heat you are referring to which is heat = wind power and light = solar power
I am terrible at explaining things and probably deserve the downvotes. If I thought they mattered I might try harder.
But I have noticed if you gap some context the Fediverse/Lemmy exposes itself. So in this instance the they need to be spoon fed “energy is energy” yea no thanks. This stopped being about changing their opinion and instead about reinforcing to myself that these NPC’s cannot be allowed to inform my opinion.
Either I’m misunderstanding you, or you’re misunderstanding the situation. They are not pulling heat from the ocean, they are adding to it. And unfortunately that heat is doing a bad job of raidiating into space.
In thermodynamics, this is the heat goes in, heat goes out. Also temperature higher, more heat goes out.
And CovfefeKills is right. Heat from the sun is orders of magnitude higher than a little bitty data centre. And that heat gets re-radiated to space. It’s all balanced. Except for when you put more heat absorbing gases into the atmosphere which include increasing levels of evaporating water. All to power and cool current data centres.
The Earth is constantly bombarded by the sun, why doesn’t the Earth just continuously heat up? Because it radiates heat away into space. So heat itself isn’t the problem okay It just goes off into space. The problems come from the balance of absorded energy vs. radiated energy which is why oil is such a bad thing at such a large scale, it’s ancient sun energy that can’t be radiated fast enough. And fucking with our enviroment and atmosphere which has degraded the ability to radiate energy.
Taking daily solar wind energy and converting it into heat energy in the ocean itself is no problem, the problem is if the ocean cannot radiate away that heat due to fucking with the atmosphere. And by taking more solar energy and converting it to useful energy we reduce the amount of fucking with the atmosphere. It’s a good thing.
They’re using the ocean to cool the computers. This heats the water.
Okay Patrick
I wonder what “wind powered” means?
Oh are you confused because you didn’t know all energy is from the sun? Yea the wind is powered by the sun fun right?
So you are that dumb.
Okay Patrick.
What will this do to the local ocean ecosystems?
China doesn’t care. The US doesn’t care.
People care… But who are we? What do we matter?
I think the dissipation must be extremely efficient. They might have instruments in place to monitor the effects (?) but I’d say the water temperature must be that of the surrouding ocean,… at worst something like 1m away from the radiators? I’m not a physicist. Perhaps the heightened temperature can even provide a hook of sorts for some species? like a weak hydrothermal vent? could be interesting to study.
In any case, the one thing that’s going to tear us apart is water availability. I think it’s smart to do away with that requirement for a data center.
Okay, who had the bright idea of boiling the ocean to make soup?
God, the insane amount of energy it would take to even remotely measure a difference in the ocean water is astronomical. You might be able to cause some small impact in a relatively small radius that could impact wildlife, but I feel like there are open enough areas that not much would be impacted in the area.
Send the torpedos…
So its like a giant electric kettle filament?
its likely more expensive, since maintenance logistics to fix, replace chips is higher than one on land. the only offset is the cooling effects at deeper waters. since they are barely paying for electricity , or water as it is on land.
Let’s boil the ocean everyone.
How long until someone has the idea to put them near already-melting glaciers
We… We’re already doing that.
Sorry. :/
I didn’t know you’d find out this way.
But now we’re doing it more efficiently!
This makes me wonder what is better - underwater DCs heating the oceans, or above water ones with all the pollution creating and water sucking cooling instead. Part of me thinks the underwater one might be better.
The issue with climate change was never with “heat production”. It’s always been the generation of heat trapping chemicals. The sun sends a stupid amount of energy our way. Generally the earth radiates almost the same amount back out into space, with a minor amount captured by various things, like photosynthesis.
Pollution alters that equation and causes more energy from the sun to get trapped in the atmosphere. That’s the problem. We could never generate as much energy as the sun (even the tiny amount that hits the earth), but we can definitely alter the atmosphere to trap more and more of that heat.
Also, the ocean is a MASSIVE heat sink. I saw someone work out the calculations recently, I don’t remember the numbers, but the conclusion was that we’d never measure a notable increase in ocean temps if we housed every datacentre in existence in the ocean. The sun hitting the ocean every day dumps more energy into the ocean directly than we’d ever be able to manage.
It all comes down to pollution.
If you take local temperatures of the ocean at different latitudes, they won’t all be the mean temperature of the ocean. It isn’t a single massive heat sink.
Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix
But that’s true no matter where you put the data center. If you have to dump the waste heat somewhere, the high density and specific heat of water is a better heatsink than the air around us.
I don’t believe they meant it that way. At that scale, literally nothing will be a uniform temperature.
That’s true, but water is so much more effective at absorbing heat than air, the effect will be negligible. It takes about 4.2 megajoules to raise one cubic meter of water 1 degree C. That energy would raise over 3 cubic KILOMETERS of air 1 degree C.
Even putting data centers at the bottom of large lakes would be unlikely to have an effect. It will not be percetable in the ocean. Regarding temperature anyway, other factors are worth considering.
This is slightly off topic but when our local NPP was operational the lake that they used as heatsink would never freeze over even in the coldest winters. Of course it’s not a huge lake.
Instead of drilling into the core we’re just going to get boiled alive. Pretty poetic for a garbage system like capalitism.
But … It’s China. It’s not jst capitalism, it’s human greed and fear.
Sure, not like US or Europe.
It’s just capitalism.
The only difference is that their capitalism is controlled by the state instead of an international oligarchy of billionaires.
I wonder how many sq km of data centers it would take to increase the temp of the ocean by 1 degree.
This page says the ocean is about 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons, which is about 1.3 x 10^21 liters, and each liter is a kg of water (yeah, yeah, the dissolved salt adds some mass but I don’t think it adds sufficient thermal mass to make a difference). It takes 4.184 kilojoules to raise 1kg of liquid water 1°C, and 1 joule is 2.778 x 10^-4 wh.
So that’s 1.55 x 10^18 watt hours, or 1,550,000 TWh.
Global electricity consumption is about 30,000 TWh per year, so if you use the entire world’s electricity consumption for 51 years you’d raise the oceans’ temperature by 1°C.
Or if you take global data center power capacity of about 125 GW, and ran them at full power 24/7, you’d be producing about 10.8 TWh per day or 3944 TWh per year. It’d take about 393 years of the world’s data centers to raise the ocean by 1°C.
Just goes to show that much more of the energy heating up our world and our oceans is coming from the sun heating up the planet and the planet failing to radiate it out past our greenhouse blanket, not from the actual heating of our atmosphere from our own energy sources.
So if data centers continue to be built then we’re pretty much lining up another climate apocalypse behind the one we’re currently in.
This really is some great filter shit.
Parts of the ocean are colder and several species are having issues locating new spawning grounds.
I remember hearing of a corodile species or something that recovered due to a new power plant discharging warm water.
Overall ocean temps rising is a problem, but the real problem is becoming more uniform temps.
Cold spots are getting warmer. But warm spots are getting colder too. And especially for fish and reptiles. They need warm spots to spawn.
Ecologically speaking this is likely to be a good thing and within a couple years this could be a very important habitat that people are talking about and acting shocked about.
Even tho logically it’s obvious
So when do we start putting big ice cubes in the ocean?
(Really this at least makes more sense then land slop centers, still silly)
they might move them to antartica or the artic.
I hope it fucken sinks
Why?
AI is why.
It has its uses. The way it’s being pushed is a different issue entirely.
Oh, well, those AI companies have been struggling to find a practical use case, so maybe you should present a pitch to them if you’re so confident in its uses, you could be worth billions!
The use case is simple. AI coding assistance. There’s a reason why Anthropic focuses almost entirely on code. Full on vibe coding is bad, but as an assistant it’s great.
maybe you should present a pitch to them if you’re so confident
They already know. The problem is they’ve sunk so much money into it already, that they’re literally hoping there will be some breakthrough that justifies all the money.
deleted by creator
Not worth it. Don’t care. Burn them all.
How many AI datacenters will it take to boil the ocean?
If it’s being powered by wind, it’s not adding additional energy to the environment, at all. It all comes down to conservation of energy, and no chemical changes are occurring.
Electrical energy is being generated by harvesting kinetic energy in the wind, that’s essentially just moving energy, converting it from one form to another. Energy can be swapped and converted around, but in the end, it almost always ends up turning into heat or light.
That wind, one way or another was going to convert its energy into heat. Most often it does that by convection, causing water vapor in the air to change state, after condensing, the now warmer water release its heat into the ocean when it falls as rain.
Turning a wind turbine to generate electricity, to run computers, is a much more elaborate route to take, but the result is the same. The wind is moving slower, a lower energy state, but the ocean is warmer, a higher energy state. It all evens out.
Edit: I just realized, that sometimes that kinetic energy from wind contributes to storms and sometimes those storms generate lightning, and while most of the energy from lightning does turn into heat, some of that energy generates light, and some of that light shoots out into space (actually escaping the earth). So probably, higher wind speeds do result in cooling the earth a very little bit (but it’s likely negligible)
Well part of the wind also comes from the solar activity warming parts of the earth up and thus changing the pressures around so it’s not an entirely closed system
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.
I don’t think people mean literally boil the ocean. Just increasing it by few Celsius degrees can be world ending.
The specific heat capacity of water is 4200J/kg. Raising the temperature of ocean water by quite a few degrees is also very improbable.
That’s true, but I still don’t think we can raise ocean temperatures through direct cooling and renewable sources the way that the greenhouse effect can. Water can absorb a lot of heat energy without changing temperature, and that is why regions close to oceans have a more temperate climate.
While I don’t have enough knowledge in this field to be making any definitive statements, my logic is as follows:
- outside of nuclear fission/fusion reactions, heat energy on the earth’s surface comes from either the sun or molten rock in the core
- that energy is responsible for everything that happens on earth, including wind energy
So we would need to get energy from off planet, use nuclear fission/fusion, or cover enough of the land area in wind and solar farms in order to redirect the sun’s energy over to the oceans.
I think the bigger concern, when it comes to heating the ocean, is that manufacturing, construction, and transport related to the data centers still releases a lot of greenhouse gases. Those gases trap the sun’s energy within our atmosphere and that WILL heat up the earth. Way more than direct cooling using ocean water.
I’m a scuba diver and you can definitely harm regions of ocean with water pumps. It’s already happening in place where nuclear is being cooled. It’s already happening in ship yards.
It’s hard to speculate how it would happen at scale though because ocean science is real fucking hard and each location is vastly different. In populated places the damage would be very noticeable if not eventually catastrophic as ocean issues compound real fast as the ecosystem is much more fluid.
That being said I imagine there would be ways to deploy this safely (ocean is big, lots of boring dead space) but I dont have trust in us to find this way.
If every data centre was passively cooled in the ocean it wouldn’t change temps by even 0.01 degrees. The Sun blasts an entire half of the planet with an absurd amount of energy every day. Energy, which technically originated from the sun, is just converted and being utilized to do work.
Not the same thing. The sun doesn’t concentrate the power in already hifhly populated gulfs and bays where these would be. We’re not building something in the middle of Atlantic Ocean.
There are a number of 6-8GWe nuclear plants that dump 15+GW into the nearby sea (or in the case of Bruce, 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.
Good point, although on the local scale you mention, wildlife could still be impacted. Hopefully, the overall impact on the ecosystem will be monitored and studied before expanding these data centers more broadly.
Around (4 to 6) * 10^(26 to 27) J total
1 gigawatt is 10^9 J/s (so around 130 billion years to reach the above.) For a terawatt that’s 130 million years. For a petawatt 130,000 years. For an exawatt about 130 years…
Note: the sun bathes Earth with around 170,000 TW (0.17 exawatts) of energy. That’s about 700-800 years if you could make the oceans sink all that sun energy. Again, this isn’t the total output of the Sun but just what impacts Earth directly.
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.)I don’t know how to objectively figure this out, but solar panels only convert energy from radiation down to far infrared of 1100nm. Water can absorb longer wavelengths, but solar output has less and less energy output at these wavelengths. However, the mystery is whether or not the panels themselves absorb or reflect such far infrared energy. I’m torn between “it might be the same” and “I’m wrong”
40…2…ob…viously…
