Samsung is building floating data centers on ships, and it's already got regulatory approval
4d 13h ago by lemmy.world/u/Alphane_Moon in hardware from www.techspot.com
This seems like the sort of idea that on the surface sounds really innovative and “outside the box” but will sink like a stone when put into action
Data centers in space, data centers on ships... it's likely just an attempt to avoid laws and oversight.
And just like all the libertarian attempts to escape the horrors of being taxed and regulated by taking to the sea this too will fail catastrophically
We'll get to see REAL digital piracy on the high seas!
Bears will eat the data centres, somehow
Would you kindly stop being so pessimistic?
No, no I don’t think I will
Seems you did not mean to make a BioShock reference. oh well, worth a try =)
Did you just vicariously woosh me via myself?
I... I'm not sure? Now I am confused, ¿?¿
Whatever the case may be, would you kindly have a great day now? ;)
For sure let’s just leave this mystery unsolved
You have a great one too, stay safe out there
Or just a way for someone that owns a rocket company to get a trillion dollars. Maybe someone making ships can get a cool $100B from suckers investors.
In the dot com bubble it was a running joke where someone would take any business idea and and add "on the internet" onto it. "We'll sell dogfood... on the internet!" Boom! A billion dollars in VC money.
So now it's take anything and add "using AI" to it. This is even better, it's not just "using AI" it's "and put a bunch of AI chips on it."
"We build ships." Yawn. "We build ships and put a bunch of AI chips on it" Ok, here's your $100 Billion!
¿Por qué no los dos? You can excite the fascist libertarians and still get the attention of the people who blow their load the moment someone adds "AI" to a product.
will sink like a stone
Microsoft already tested underwater data centres ages ago.
That makes a lot more sense to me, keeping something on the bottom of the ocean is much easier that keeping something floating on it
Yes, but I think maintenance is easier on the surface.
We have an opening for a system admin.
Requirements:
- Experience maintaining production servers at scale
- In depth knowledge of security best practices, prevention, mitigation
- SCUBA certification
- Aquatic self-defense skills
Connection will suck. Imagine this thing and its delicate hardware hit by 10m high waves all the time.
These datacenters will probably be used for AI training, or they will get their own ocean cables.
It'll have to have a satellite connection and that will go out if there's a storm.
Makes infinitely more sense than in space.
Power, maintainence, and cooling all seem easier
Honestly, if it was mandated that data centers are only allowed to use renewable energy, this wouldn't be too bad.
Would waste heat go into the air or water? What affects could that have?
It would go into the water, and it would have basically no effect at all.
The amount of heat is many orders of magnitude too low to heat the oceans up.
As long as you don't park in very shallow waters where it would have a local effect.
Isn't this the attitude that got us climate change in the first place?
True. But the scale is still a bit different:
Climate change added 400 ZJ of heat energy to the oceans so far.
If we piped the heat of all datacenters that currently exist into the oceans, that would add 0.001 ZJ per year.
The major issue (for global warming, not local warming) isn't waste heat, it's greenhouse gasses.
Heating the oceans globally would require insane and totally unrealistic scale, but the effect on ecosystem on the immediate surroundings is a good question.
A single ship? Ye, no impact.
Thousands? Well, that will be very noticeable.
If the electricity comes from renewable sources, it is no (global) problem. In that case, you've just taken the sun's energy from one place (solar panel, wind turbine, etc.) and moved it elsewhere (the ocean). That's fine, that energy was going to end up heating the Earth in any case.
This is very different from greenhouse gas emissions, as those increase the total amount of energy the sun delivers to Earth, changing the global balance.
I'd probably be more concerned with them using bunker b or c for power generation.
Came here for this comment. The image is suspiciously free of smokestacks.
I'm more worried about the sound pollution. Sound travels so much farther underwater and things like sonar are god awful for marine life. I can only noise reduction will not be prioritized when building these things quickly.
But still less than just letting it sit on a shoreline.
Except if you want to be in international waters, far away from pesky laws an stuff.
"Why bring the water to data centers if we can bring the data centers to water?"
-- some dumbass exec
Ocean water is far more abundant than fresh drinking water. If they have to build them and they need water to cool them this seems better. Although definitely potential for issues like hurricanes / storms and environmental impact for starters. They seem desperate to roll out AI as fast as possible, consequences be damned, so they better start thinking outside the box. This technology isn’t more important than freshwater for life to survive.
They're so desperate they're putting it in the worst places. I've seen it replace the normal search bar on one website, and on another you would just randomly get an AI answer instead of regular search results about half the time.
Oh, so Google, the largest and most used website of all time?
Yeah, but imagine if the ai results were all you got instead of those in addition to search results.
There is also the added advantage that half of the world's population lives within 150 miles of the ocean, so finding personnel shouldn't be a problem.
You know what to do, killer orcas
You might call them Killer Whales.
Killer Luigi?
Pirates are gonna have an awesome day. I will buy all the stuff they can steal from it.
Is this the sign of the upcoming pirate age?
The real One Piece is the datacenters Samsung made along the way
No it's a sign of delusion by these companies and governments.
We're sorry Mr Robertoe, the pirates, they stole your data. You should change your password right away!
I’ll take some cpus and a few gpus. And 1tb for ram. What do you mean 200$ for 1tb of ram?? The last pirate said 100$!
Pirates of the Caribbean
What a beautiful coincidence.
I am building ethically sourced, renewable, solar powered torpedoes, and I will not be seeking regulatory approval.
because the ocean warming and inevitable collapse of the gulf stream wasnt happening fast enough, apparently.
And less tax and worker protection laws in international waters.
Data centers arent big on the job creation front to begin with. Once they are built its basically a security guy for show, and a tech that flies in once a fortnight to deal with the odd, occasional issue.
a floating datacenter would probably have even less jobs, since they probably wont need the security guard to keep the punk kids away anymore.
Yes, however the ship itself will need maintenance and operators, and can be flagged in whatever country of convenience that offers the best ability to pay the least. No property taxes, far fewer environmental rules, free water, etc.
Who only float out, what, once a fortnight? And thats probably being generous.. Probably be a drone ship that spends 98% of its time on autopilot with someone only intervening when an issue pops up.
Im somewhat surprised nobody has mentioned how corrosive salt water is. This likely would have to be some platform like an oil rig with power and internet via cables. So why not buy Sealand and build it out? Still lots oft Saltwater in the Wind and offshore but no need to have it floating around in rough waters.
The nation of Sealand cannot be bought!
Cheaper to build and maintain probably. You can dock a ship for a while but you need to bring manpower to a platform
Heating up random parts of the ocean, can only good happen!
The amount of heat is going to be negligible for the ocean, especially compared to a permanent structure pumping heat into the ground or a neighborhood. I'm more worried about how they're powering the things. Probably some fossil fuel.
Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean. These center produce large amounts of heat. Hot spots causing updrafts which will be an issue on the ocean.
Once we open this box, tons of companies will follow.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-centers-temperature-spikes
There have been and are hundreds of thousands of natural underwater volcanoes that create heat far surpassing data centers....
Based on that I would like to know why you think data center heat would have an effect noticeable past those volcanoes.
Volcanoes are natural. They aso create land, enrich soil, and the ash has helped with warming. Most happen underwater which never effect the surface due to how deep they are.
A floating toaster oven will increase over time. The increase heat will create FUCKING UPDRAFTS. Messing with our trade winds and jet stream is a great way to game over.
Also our jet stream has been dipping farther and farther south. Creating more volatile situations.
I am pretty sure you are letting your dislike of data centers cloud your judgement of how large their heat related impact can be.
Relative to the vastness of the oceans a data center is so negligible that I feel you don't understand the size of the ocean at all.
They would have to build a million data centers, yes, a million (or perhaps even millions, plural) , to have any heat impact which is economically and resource related impossible. For reference, all data centers worldwide on land now count 11k.
Don't let your personal dislike of something cloud your ability for rational analysis.
It's slightly less stupid than data centers in space I suppose. But I still find it pretty weird.
You will have to be tethered to land anyway. Properly high bandwidth networking as you would usually see to connect a data center (on the order of a dozen terabits per second) only exists through fiber optic cables. I'm sure of this point, because optical networking is my day-job, though we only run 400 Gbit/s links on the fastest edges since we're a small national network.
As for power, well there are 80 MW ship engines (e.g. Wärtsilä-Sulzer RT-flex96C, which has even been built in Korea under license before), so it's not impossible I suppose. But if you are tethered, then the country you're tethered to will probably forbid you from burning bunker fuel for 80 MW on its coast. At which point you'd be reduced to running clean diesel or something. That I expect would make the power more costly than just tethering to an electric grid
So now we have a big barge rather than a ship. What do you really save then? I guess the price of the land? And you gain access to copious amounts of saltwater, so you can do closed loop cooling with freshwater, and do the secondary heat exchange to the ocean. But you could do that by building on the coast too. Okay I guess you might gain tsunami security over a coastal building.
If this is a real proposal why don't they tell us the material advantages they expect, rather than making us guess?
Insurance scuttles, here we come
Sovereignty.
Country gets a new hostile government or prsident? Guess we'll just sail our datacenters somewhere else
Ironic, considering AI is built on piracy
Has claimed that it is planning to build
FTFY
What if it sinks
Then they certainly won't overheat
Poseidon plz 🥺
How will the data centers be connected to the Internet? Satellite? Sounds expensive.. Or those cruise ships selling their internet data packages are all lying about how expensive is to have satellite internet..
Just hook straight into the undersea fiber cables like the chinese and russian do, duh
If they got starlink they're all lying, but they might not have it yet.
They'd pay the commercial rates whatever that is, but either way, they're lying.
Warming local water systems will have zero effect on the local environment and wildlife
Terrible article. Does not answer the "why" question. What is the advantage? All it says is that "Seasides can ease the pains of giant mainland AI date centers". Is it just skirting around taxes and rules, like a floating casino? The ship would have a shoreside power connection or power itself as well apparently. Would the ships generators be subject to the same emission requirements as shoreside plants?
Seems like just a floating barge that will not really be out at sea, just sitting in protected bays or up waterways. Cooling water, would have to use a closed circuit freshwater system with heat exchangers cooling it with saltwater. That would consume less water than the evaporation cooling method, but still is not listed a possible reason.
Ships are expensive. What is the reason for floating a data center? Cheaper than land near big cities? Less regulations? Less taxes? Cooling water? Cheaper electricity?
They're doing it to grab the headlines away from Solar Roadways!!
Some large companies have been experimenting with underwater data centres for years. i remember reading about a microsoft one like 10 years ago.
Yeah but those were not on ships.
Good torpedo targets
Makes sense. Leaves our potable water alone and keeps the fuckers out of sight. They could even put in wind turbines to power the fucking things.
The warming of the water is likely an issue for marine life and ecosystems
The water is being warmed by burning hydrocarbons which emit massive quantities of CO and CO2 which in turn hold in the sun's heat which in turn causes the oceans to heat up dangerously. Not to mention CO2 is an acidic gas which wreaks havoc on marine life and land life.
The amount of heat instilled in the oceans from this type operation is negligible.
Yeah I disagree with this sentiment, "things are already bad so this new level of bad is negligible"
Yeah sure a single instance but how quickly will it ramp up? What are the local consequences of it? See UV suncream bleaching the barrier reef for examples on how we can destroy nature simply by being present in it.
You are excusing something that is not necessary, to the detriment of habitats, biomes and ourselves.
Tweaker version of Red October where they steal all the copper: “Itsh a game of chesh against our old adversary…”
JK but the oceans aren't really warming up fast enough. Maybe a buttload of gpus may help?
Wait, isn’t this what happened in Snowcrash?
What regulatory approval do you need if it's in international waters
Ships have to be registered in a country and follow the laws of that country when they're in international water.
If you don't register your ship you're effectively a pirate and any navy can just blast your ship out of the water.
Ding Ding! We have a winner!
Yupp, I've heard that the sea need more help heating up....
I’ve seen pictures of data centers with parking lots full of cars. Are they going to ferry people to and from work each shift?
Probably like an oil rig rotation. You live and work for a contracted period of time on the boat, then you cycle off with someone else every few months or so.
That makes sense, but it’s also incredibly unappealing.
People on oil rigs aren't necessarily the most skilled in their field. They still make well above median income because they put up with shit like this. Im sure something similar would develop. Would you sign up for a 12 week contract if it paid $60k?
Reasonability of the solution aside, Samsung is uniquely positioned to propose such project as one of the largest electronics manufacturer and shipmaker in the world.
Honestly if they are going to build a datacenter anyway, this is my preferred way to go. Plenty of water for cooling, power is harder but not impossible.
Lots of wind on the sea
Samsung: Can we have AI monies too?
I always kinda wondered how biblical ocean boiling would come about.
The ark had all the hardware, a pair of each. Switches, routers, firewalls, ...
A twisted pair