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by Theodores 2 days ago
Wasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling?

What happened to that?

Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark.

As of yet I have not seen the use of server racks as structural architectural features. They always seem to need a vast shed that has its own supports, when server racks could also be the walls and supports for much of the building, or some other structure, maybe a road bridge.
2 comments
2PqboPPmKegvanx 2 days ago
>Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling

Project Natnick!

It was a success, the research concluded and it is no longer active.

Article: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Natick

In June, China opened a $236 M wind powered underwater data center. Article references another commercial underwater data center they opened in 2023.

https://www.wired.com/story/china-opens-worlds-first-wind-po...

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throwoutway 2 days ago
It was a success? then why it not scaled up instead of shut down
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Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago
The price of Datacenter are the AI chips but the bottleneck in creation of them is power, given how much power exhaustive they are (and rightfully so) people protesting against it because its them who pays the price.

That being said, the shipping container idea is decent but the bottleneck is still power not so much cooling, so unless someone figures out a way to have an actual nuclear power reactor, there are issues.

Also oh the issue isn't that there aren't nuclear power reactors but that they aren't large enough. Some nuclear powered datacenters exist in some experimental settngs but these new Datacenters are trying to take a magnitude more and they can't wait for the production of those things and further research.

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