Underwater Data Centers: The Next Big Thing in Keeping Computers Cold 

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As an IT employee with enough data center experience. I would say one of the other factors would be the lack of dust. Dust is present in any data center and over time sticks to servers internally making fans work harder and settling on components making them harder to cool down.

You forgot another potential contributor to reliability... water, especially several meters of it, makes a pretty good radiation shield. Stray radiation is the cause of quite a bit of both transient glitches (bit flips) and general degradation in modern microchips. I'd be surprised is this wasn't another component of the positive results.

I had been wondering how we could go about boiling off the oceans to make WH40Ks Terra a reality. This is definitely a start.

Perfect for Deep learning hehe

I put my computer in the bath to help cool it down, it made some noises and now it doesn't work. Thanks Simon! 👍

Like the Kaminoan facility out of Star Wars Looks incredible 😮

You don't need to access the canisters with a deepwater diver/AUV/ROV. Cables have to come ashore and as they get into shallower water they are exposed to anchors dragging, saboteurs, etc. Then there's always dropping stuff that goes bang on the canisters. Oh, and sea life loves to occupy places with moving seawater, like the inlets and outlets of pumps, blocking them with flesh and shells. Can't see anything going wrong with unattended stuff in the ocean.

Maxie takes a very nice photo. Question is: in an unsealed submerged container, how do you keep the water out of the servers?

I suppose it could also be a good way to reuse off shore oil rigs you get a place to raise and lower the modules, a place to do maintenance and security

New idea. Build Data centres into municipal pool buildings. Use the servers to heat the pools. Will save vast amounts of power and water.

i bet simon is just the tentacles of a superorganism that runs all its channels. Its a superorganism, that's why its able to make nonstop content that requires superhuman information collection and processing power. Just think about it.

Genius! Troublesome to set up, but actually perfect for it!

I'm left wondering if marine growth, especially on the very deep unit, inaccessible to divers, could be a problem. I guess as long as it's a passive heat sink not relying on any water being transferred through pipes which can be blocked by growth, it should be fine.. Great idea 👍

I would say the base of any offshore wind turbine would be a nice place to put such data centre. cooling from the surrounding sea and energy from the turbine (if you can get the right volage)

Very interesting. The things you dig up are worth watching. Thanks for putting up such interesting content. My brain needs this kind of food. ✌️

6:32 actually at 1/8 the failure rate you are 800% more reliable... technically actually 700% as u start counting from the initial 100%...

Regarding security of deep water data centers, my concern would be more with the umbilicals required to service these data centers. They need to link to land at some point, and that is a huge length of cable that is at a relatively shallow depth, and accessible by anyone with the will.

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Once these increase in scale, I imagine marine life will flock to these under water centers. How would that affect the project?

Data centers are being built at beak neck pace and is still accelerating. They’re up and running w/ in a year in most cases.

Another great video Simon .

Something that struck me is that if these data centers are meant to not be recovered, then it would be relatively simple and ecologically friendly to design the outsides to act as artificial reefs! Assuming they’re to be placed in the correct areas, of course.

Storage technology moves way faster than any other in the computing world. By the time you built one of these you would think it would be completely obsolete.

So if they put these boxes next to Scotland's new tidal generators and/ or a giant windturbine floating above deep water,and nature will give the power to run it.

Self-contained submerged data centers nearly eliminate dust too. Humans produce a lot of it and it's not healthy for electronics. Many failures are caused by shorts due to small dust particles. Land based DCs invest a lot into filtration. Submerging also eliminates any potential for interfering radiation as water blocks most RF frequencies. Ever hear of cosmic rays flipping bits? It's an interesting phenomenon.

As someone who works with servers constantly - changing out a failed drive might be a little tricky in a sealed unit like that, and all it takes is 1 or 2 drives to fail and then one server is toast then you need to pull it out. And drives fail constantly, even enterprise grade ones. Sure 2 years is not a long time to have the pod submerged, but when you have hundreds or thousands of these pods to maintain the cost of the energy to bring these back up and back down again is going to add up and make that ROI shrink dramatically compared to a land-based server farm.

Tom Cruise will be Free Diving to that depth no matter how deep, and he will defeat two giant squids and a kraken just because.

Seems like an ideal way to supplement central heating plants.

There is a lot of research that could piggyback on these underwater server farms, with sensors to detect what ever a scientist may want to be researching. Cameras on the outside could potentially record new species, even.

Next versions probably wouldn't need extremal power, as that could be provided by tidal flow

Revolutionary!! 😮 I'm all 4 it! DO IT!

The next version is not going to be that hard to figure out. It will be bigger, probably going to try and make it as modular as possible, close to a place that has cheaper electricity, close to a fast fiber optic internet connection, they will probably experiment with different types of heat dissipation, different types of systems. They will try to figure out how big you can make a module before it becomes too much of a loss if there is a failure and it needs to be swapped out. What's the best shape and heat dissipation design to make sure components in the center cool the same as components close to the shell? What is the best way to power them ? Should you send 240v into the module and step it down internally? , Taking space and generating more heat? But much easier to transmit any distance...or step it down to the low voltages outside the module but have to have separate units very close because 12v DC cannot be transmitted very far without issues ? And many more questions I would have to know answers for if I was them lol.

"if only billions of people watched." Lol Simon trying to be modest. Thanks for the content as always Simon and Co. 🍻

Hell ya! Warm those oceans!

I often wondered why we dont have server farms right at hydro rich areas. If they were right near a hydro electric dam, dam , or watercourse, cooling would be almost free. You hear all about the server farms in Tenn /Kentucky pissing people off at night . when its quiet you can hear the cooling tower fans for miles. And the multiple sites generate a harmonic that apparently is never ending for some with good hearing.

So all data to be stored in the sea and not The Cloud?

I believe that the reliability of the equipment was also influenced by the fact that water protected the electronic components from destructive, high-energy cosmic rays.

Capable of storing 6.6 million hours of 4K video? Simon will need three.

I always thought that big computers used refrigeration for cooling instead of just pumping water

I work on the other side of the world and our Active Armed Offender training is exactly the same down to the language used.... They carried it out text book... Penetrate and Dominate!.... Champions!

This is an awesome idea and clearly entirely feasible, available with today's technology - although as they scale up unforeseen problems might emerge. As someone else mentioned, they may run into problems with marine growth, but you can always put the things in places where sea life is minimal (like very deep sea beds, such as on the Abyssal plains...or where trawlers have destroyed the local ecosystem). A surveillance system and ability to periodically inspect or raise the containers for cleaning might be required, though.

Dumping heat into that « near infinite » heat sink sounds a lot like what people thought about dumping CO2 into the atmosphere… growth and scale can surprise you

A) Ironically, the design of those tank things resembles the fancy schmancy aqua coffin those billionaires tested last year. B) If they built apartments over land-based data centers, I would totally move there and enjoy not freezing indoors anymore

thank you. Was there any information shared on how much energy was saved. I think that is more important than the longetivity of the server life . Data centers consume a lot of energy and in Ireland planning permission has been denied for a few. including Apples' and Amazons' .

A number of comments on the presumed benefits: - How do you propose to keep reliability up? Most datacenters have massive generators and battery banks to ensure they're never going down. Undersea cables regularly get damaged by fishing vessels or by sabotage. - While the sea is a massive heat sink, it's not invulnerable to heating. If we do sink huge datacenters to the bottom of oceans, they will still create heat. How much that influences the ecosystems around them is then a matter for research. - Claiming those datacenters are somehow more secure physically is disingenious. Banking datacenters for example are more or less fortresses, with double walls, reinforced concrete, sensor arrays and multiple data links, often themselves heavily protected. An underwater datacenter has none of that, regardless of how deep you sink it - a relatively small detonation will completely destroy it. Not to mention the vulnerability of the power and data lines that go to them, and undersea cables are non-trivial to replace/repair. I don't deny that they have benefits e.g. for cloud computing, but they're not a panacea to solve all problems. They'll solve some, they'll create new ones.

I'm curious if there is/was any consideration in managing the marine growth and corrosion in the cooling systems.

Great idea, guy! Just make sure you drop them deep and put them as close as possible to all that seafloor methane ice!

This is an interesting project. Let's see what will happen in the future.

Now send out the maintenance bots to fix any mechanical issues and swim back.

In the late 80s I worked as a.computer operated. The mainframe room was the size of a football field. So I can imagine today they must be getting pretty large

We need massive internet cables to Antarctica and use the South Pole to cool world wide data centers. Infinite cooling would allow for greater computing and data storage.

The point is not to keep the data centers cold from their own energy dissapation, it is to protect them from electromagnetic pulse and nuclear war.

Some submarines can def to to 3km. And you don't even need to reach the pods. Just find/damage/cut the cables. Or drop an explosive to that depth.

@6:30 1/8 failure rate does NOT mean 87.5% more reliable. It means 8 TIMES more reliable, which, when represented as a percentage increase, would equate to 700% more reliable.

Security of underwater data centers would be a problem with state sponsored underwater special forces clandestine covert operations.

Video idea, the L39 Albatross Jet plane, made in the Czech Republic, the most used jet trainer in the world

Could you do a Slik Road / ross ulbricht video please

Just imagine how easy it will be to dump waste data center equipment when you already have ships equipped for deep sea missions. Think about that side of the coin.

I can only imagine how what kind of material the exterior would have to be. Not just high tensile strength, but also high rigidity, high resistance to mechanical fatigue, thermally conductive but electrically insulating. Off the top of my head, I can only think of a handful of materials that can do this, and none of them come cheap. And recycling them would be a nightmare. Imagine that kind of tech waste floating around in the ocean. Heavy metals, polymers, alkali electrolytes, just an environmental nightmare. Then again, I'm not an electrical or computer engineer, just a materials scientist. Maybe I'm out of my element here, no pun intended.

Yeah the pod is very safe. So just attack the cable where it's more reachable.

Um… google did this same thing just off shore around 2017-2018 there was a article about it weird how now you can’t find it. They were even using ocean water intercooler as a test. Prior in 2015 ish time line.

plenty of outdoor pools/water parks that could use the heating with the use of heat pumps

yes we need to hear our oceans more

Water cooled makes sense, but anything that needs maintenance is going to be unreachable if it's dropped into the ocean... This briefs well but it's not going to pan out...

That's cool....literally, cool

I take one look at the continental shelf and think, “It’s free real estate.”

Ahh , so this is where the Pirate Bay servers are hidden ,,In an old ship under the sea,,

This must be one of the most destructive ideas covered on this channel and that's saying something

This sounds like a great idea. Free environmentally friendly cooling, at the cost of not being able to easily access the servers for maintenance and upgrades. Theirs another revolutionary device that would avoid access constraints. Its called a pump

I can't get over the last name Whistler. Traditional British last names come as a description of the family patriarch's profession. At some point in history, this man's great great great * n grandfather went from court to court, town to town, whistling entertainment. And here, hundreds of years later, he does it again, in the family tradition.

¿ Physical security ? For the entire center. One pinhole or anchor strike...oopsie. Disruptive equipment is old hat to government players.

Nice idea in theory, but given ocean warming is already an issue, as one of the impacts of climate change, this should be a non-starter. Or if you want to go the water-cooling route, build large lagoons on land, similar to the ones used for storing radioactive waste.

harder for an enemy to destroy them too, of course not impossible but harder.

submerged data centers are a great idee for cooling but not practical the maintenance on the servers is the problem if you have a disk failure on a server you must get an diver to the place. or you must get the datacenter lift out the sea to land replace te disk en then sink the datacenter down in sea again

Computers and water, good mix.

Boiling the oceans faster than ever!

Our sites are usually up in a year soup to nuts. Although the land is purchased well in advance so i'm unsure how that factors in

I dare not imagine what the environmental impact moving data centres underwater would bring. Heat is heat. Those data centres will still generate heat, and while the surrounding waters will help keep them cool, those centres could likewise increase the temperature of the surrounding seawater; particularly if the technology is applied at scale.

Is it possible to get referances which was used for this video? I am using it for a school project :)

Really don't need them to be that deep, you could just use an old oil rig and some pipes a few hundred feet deep to access consistent water temperatures

There is a potential negative impact at scale however. These systems discharge warm/hot water. If a lot of units are placed just off shore in say, a bay or cove, or near nature preserves, the could cause a rise in localized sea temperature. Even a degree or two hotter, and certain species might migrate too early in the season, certain species might die off locally, and algae blooms could be increased. At a global scale, if ALL data centers went into the ocean, we would just be offsetting above ground environmental impacts for below water environmental impacts.

please do more tech videos

Imagine the power supply needs changing

Submarines can't go deep enough, lol. They'll pick your pod up and take it home with them.

Seems best to interweave with more accessible data centers, but yeah that seems like it will be what we use the ocean for a lot. The issue with space in many cases is how difficult it is to bleed of heat. The more technical a construct like stacking silicon is, the more it’s sensitive to heat, and the more heat it could put off the more power it draws. Use earths greatest resource advantage versus extraterrestrial ventures. Of course we are already very irresponsible with our water resources. So we have to build smart. We won’t. But we could.

I work in a data center great career field and great job security. Tech is here to stay

We have Google Earth, Amazon Fire, Apple Air, and now, get ready for Microsoft Water.

I say put them in space. Vacuum, cold. Win win

Can we do Simon as a Captain Scarlet Stingray baddie?

It's pretty good. It would be better if it floated though

Oh yes we all saw how " safe " underwater infrastructure is , now imagine something even more expansive than pipe

What could possibly go wrong

Completely impervious to attack. Except all the cables that are regularly broken or damaged apparently. 2 to 3 times a year ALL of the interweb goes down because of damaged subsea cables.

Wouldn’t warming the ocean be a really bad idea??? For a lot of reasons. Weather, underwater environmental changes displacing native life, displaced native life being endangered. Then wouldn’t those changes in an ecosystem cause a chain reaction that would effect other ecosystems nearby???

This is genius.

Neat

Could the excess heat be used to create fresh water?

Heat up the oceans great idea

Maybe the heat can be used to provide heat to defrost floating solar arrays on lakes and ponds in cold climates.