this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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TechTakes
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All the venture capitalists who got scammed into funding this:
"Data centers on hard mode" is such a good way to put it.
@burble @dgerard this is where Vibe Physics gets you
Space is cold; but if something is hot in space, doesn't it also need to, like... Push the heat away somehow? No air, no wind, heat just stays there. 🤷♂️
Yup, they can only dump heat through infrared radiation. The giant white fins on the ISS are radiators for waste heat.
I think there is another way to dump wase heat. Use it to warm up something that has a lot of heat capacity, and then eject that. Not practical and a huge waste (I also got this from science fiction), so you know they are going to try it. Gonna suck for us groundies.
"Run, the Muxk servers are overhead, it is raining molten tin!"
@burble @techtakes
Why not submerge them in a river for far less money.
Microsoft had an underwater datacenter-in-a-container test a while back.
He touches on that in the blog post, and gives us this link: https://www.itpro.com/infrastructure/data-centres/microsoft-scrapped-its-project-natick-underwater-data-center-trial-heres-why-it-was-never-going-to-work
"How do we cool these things?"
"idk, boil the oceans?"
I'm surprised lagering caves, except for servers instead of beer hasn't come up yet.
Didn't Meta, then Facebook, open a datacenter somewhere in the Arctic circle and leave it exposed to the environmental cold? Until the planet runs out of cold, an eventuality whose impending rapidity I'd rather not ponder, that seems a viable approach.
Underwater datacenters make cooling very effective and maintenance nearly impossible, so you have to treat the container data centers essentially disposable. That's only viable with economy of scale big enough to be an xkcd comic punchline. I guess Microsoft found that even they are not quite there yet. Also most computers don't tolerate seawater quite as well as they tolerate air.
@bitofhope
Pretty sure space datacenters are also going to be even more disposable.
imagine a $100b GPU data centre with the disposability of a cubesat
Oh yea absolutely. Underwater datacenters have one upside (cooling) and massive downsides (everything else, more or less). Space datacenters trade that upside into yet another downside, make the downsides even bigger and add a few extra downsides for good measure.