IEEE SpectrumWhere will we find the space for new data centers? Startup Aikido Technologies points to offshore wind farms as the answer. https://spectrum.ieee.org/data-center-floating-wind-turbine?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Mastodon-Daily-Pipeline
Thomas Sturm@ieeespectrum ...because cooling servers with salt water is supposed to be easy?
Chao-c'@tsturm well, you would have heat exchangers, of course, and somewhere like North Sea, it would mean basically freecooling most of the year.
The environment would be probably mostly sealed and replaced as a kind of container (?)
It is less nonsense, than data centers on orbit, but otherwise, AI is still nonsense (but everybody around me, except on Mastodon, seems to be somehow excited about it... which is why there is demand for such solutions).
Training of neural networks using excess energy from renewables would make *some* sense (better, than burning gas...)
@xChaos @ieeespectrum True - relatively free energy and cooling. But the heat exchanger will be submersed in ocean water and that sounds like a constant maintenance nightmare.
@tsturm it depends on the total surface area of the buoy.
I am part of company running small datacentrum (not AI, just classical servers) ourselves, so I have some idea, how cooling is done (we reuse the waste heat, BTW)
Or another example: huge ships. They have literally megawatts of waste heat (from average huge diesel engines) and they manage to dissipate this heat into seawater without problems. This is mature technology... basically just some stainless pipes and filters...
I am not really sure how much AI of any type we really need, but powering it by renewables still seems like better idea, then by gas.