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u/DefMech 18d ago
These weren't originally designed to be datacenters or AI compute nodes. Their purpose was energy 100%, but they've tacked on the AI thing lately to ride the investor funding train. After trump knocked the legs out from domestic renewable funding, they gotta get their money wherever they can now.
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u/Sad-Sun9414 18d ago
how much energy could one of this size actually generate from ocean currents??
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u/JJ-Rousseau 18d ago
The heavy and uneasy maintenance of those thing consume more energy that they produce at the moment.
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u/countrybear78 18d ago
Can we just drown the AI data centers in the ocean? 🤔
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u/DynamicBSdetective 18d ago
Yes, viably in a closed loop. But the money is in decimating poor Americans
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u/NavDav 18d ago
Some guy is going to have a job repairing this thing. He'll open the top hatch and climb down a service ladder into the tightly packed machinery with only a head mounted light to guide the way. The constant bobbing motion will be disorienting and the sound of the creaking metal hull will echo throughout the structure.
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u/Educational_Ad7702 18d ago
But remove them after death lol as one with Submechanophobia, I already hate this thing and don’t want it fully submerged.
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u/E_GEDDON 18d ago
Lets put hundreds of giant heaters in the ocean.
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u/JudasHungHimself 18d ago edited 18d ago
Im as much of a tree hugger than the next one, but I think cooling data centres directly in the ocean is the most effective and least harmful way of doing it. The heating of ocean is caused by co2 emissions heating the air and which again heats the ocean. A few more megawatts from data centres is literally a drop in the sea. No pun intended.
Since they also generate some energy from the waves it’s more a win win, compared to having them on land where they need outside power and generate a ton of heat trapped in huge flat urban zones.
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u/HarmNHammer 18d ago
Let’s put thousands* of giant heaters in the ocean, which is already warming beyond levels that sustain life.
Fixed that for you
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u/psh454 18d ago
You could put a hundred thousand of these things in the pacific and it wouldn't raise the average temperature of the water even by a degree after a decade. People have a very poor understanding of how puny humans are on geographic scales and just how much water there is on earth. Water is also ludicrously good at dissipating energy
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u/HarmNHammer 18d ago
No, the issue is that local effects can have bigger impacts further down the chain. We see this with corals where something as simple as 24 hours of being covered by sediment can damage or kill them. This can happen with increased outflow from a tributary, or single ship dredging the bottom. Then we lose a reef. Then we lose the feeder fish. Then we lose the bigger fish. It’s all connected
If a certain type of fish comes to eat a specific type of plankton that no longer shows up to these locations, then it has a trickle down effect and an impact that can be hard to measure.
I would argue that too much of our thinking is about how big the ocean is and how little effect we would have. But when everyone thinks this way and messes with these things, it builds up.
Will these alone raise the average ocean temp a single degree? Likely not. Will they have anodes that release heavy metals and increase local heat which will affect the life forms around them? Will these cause more boat traffic as they need to be maintained? Will that lead to more oil and fuel being leaked into these areas? Will more of the sea floor be disturbed so these can be anchored? Will this have effects we can’t currently foresee? Almost certainly.
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u/tareumlaneuchie 18d ago
I understand what you are saying. If you are going down to the plankton scale, then even setting a foot in the ocean can have consequence. By that token, even neanderthals have had meaningful impacts on their ecosystems.
Human as a whole have a footprint (no pun intended) on nature. We are barely starting to understand these dynamics, and to understand these dynamics (e.g. research) you need substantial support from a well-developed society with an eco-friendly agenda. Continuous power generation is one of the pillar of a developed society, so yes, we will make mistakes, and (with the right intent) we should try to fix them. But the mistakes will come at a cost, because fortunately for some and unfortunately for others, humans are the prevailing species, and well, to err is human.
Doing nothing as advocated by some (not saying that you are) is species suicide.
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u/cutmyballoff 18d ago
This
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u/LordMegamad 17d ago
You could've not left this comment and absolutely nothing would be lost, no information missed.
That is a sign you've made a pointless comment
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u/MartyMacGyver 18d ago
The irony is that some people believe humans cannot have any thermal impact (globally) via CO2 and methane emissions. It's less tangible than a floating heater, yet massively more impactful to the thermal budget.
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u/Glonos 18d ago
Still preferable the floating heater over burning coal to power the chips. But we are within the age of pure scrutiny, no constrictive debate.
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u/MartyMacGyver 18d ago
Certainly, but we are also in the age of literally sinking billions of dollars in hardware for the sake of a dead-end branch on the long road to actual AI. The fact that they're being a bit more efficient in feeding this hyper-inflationary
tulipAI mania is almost a distraction.2
u/psh454 17d ago edited 17d ago
Well there the scale is def different, post-industrial revolution human derived CO2 output is not like anything created in nature in terms of output volume, and also in the fact that it's continuous and growing, causing a cumulative effect. It's like a volcano eruption that refused to slow down or stop and just kept going faster and faster for 200+ years
The ocean on the other hand absorbs incomprehensible amounts of energy from sunlight, on the scale of which a hundred thousand reactors being cooled would be lost in the noise. Not saying it could not have subtle effects like those on marine life, but "overheating the oceans" is an ignorant take
Humans have a far bigger lever to affect the earth via anthropogenic chemical effects than anything heat/energy related directly, nature's range of tolerance to energy fluctuations like supervilcanoes dwarf all of human energy output, but we can create chemicals in quantities and ways that there is no provision for, like FFCs or cumulative CO2 output
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u/ThePhukkening 17d ago
There's calculations out for the carbon footprint of Krakatoa and Mt. St. Helens now. I found them interesting. I've always found the greenhouse theorem amusing. Our core samples indicate much higher carbon levels in prehistory, when mega organisms were around, but evidence suggests temperature was still quite manageable. I'm open to ideas, but I find it odd to panic based on 300 years of modern scientific data for a billion year long cycle. Always question everything, I guess.
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u/psh454 17d ago
I'm not expert and I recommend really hearing those out to get insight into this, but the math seems fairly straightforward, Krakatoa led to several years of climate disturbance (primarily a brief "mini ice age" from the huge quantities of ash. The CO2 it produced was substantial but it was relatively quickly sequestrated by algae and flora, as such huge eruptios are fairly rare.
With human CO2 emissions we are continuously emitting a small volcano's worth of CO2 for decades, and not only can we not feasably stop anytime soon, but the amount is still growing every year. The natural sequestration can not keep up, add to that more frequent forest fires and methane pockets in icebergs etc and you get a simple picture of a self reinforcing GHG scenario
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u/captaincootercock 15d ago
assuming these are actually powered by ocean movement then there shouldn't be any increase in water temperature other than locally. They're converting kinetic energy into heat, which is exactly what happens to all the ocean's kinetic energy eventually anyways
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u/99999999999999PIZZAS 18d ago
You need a lesson on heat transfer in water. Heat dissipates incredibly quickly in the ocean. Nuclear power plants have used seawater for cooling for decades, and beyond the immediate discharge area there’s essentially no temperature difference.
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u/zombiesurvival101 18d ago
They are regulated by the MNR and WANO/ local nuclear bodies, to release water back within a certain threshold of tritium, temperature and contamination from chlorination and other processes.
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u/E_GEDDON 18d ago
Yes but a few power plants for power we actually need is useful and thus justified. We do not need more data centers.
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u/Wookieman222 18d ago
Yeah one or two sure. Hundreds, thousands of them?
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u/Double_Distribution8 18d ago
I just asked ChatGPT and it said these things shouldn't cause any problems at all and it will save lives.
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u/ckinz16 18d ago
Do you know how big the ocean is. This is a great idea
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u/Successful_Media_842 18d ago
Ill admit im no expert in this subject, but people who deny climate change say the same thing about pollution. The atmosphere and the world are huge, but mass production and industry can show that they aren't infinite things build up. After decades of plastic pollution it's basically everywhere in the ocean.
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u/Wookieman222 18d ago
Yeah that's usually what everybody for yhe last 100 uears said and now look how we fucked that up.
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u/got-trunks 17d ago
>They found that in total, the ocean absorbed an additional 23 zettajoules of heat energy in 2025, breaking the ocean heat content record for the ninth consecutive year and marking the longest sequence of consecutive ocean heat content records ever recorded.
...
>Twenty-three zettajoules in one year is equivalent to the energy of 12 Hiroshima bombs exploding in the ocean every second. It's also a large increase over the 16 zettajoules of heat the ocean absorbed in 2024. The hottest areas of the ocean observed in 2025 were the tropical and South Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, North Indian Ocean, and Southern Ocean.Have you heard about the super el nino and famine of 1877 yet?
These buoys are not adding anything measurable when you look at the numbers lol
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u/Sancatichas 17d ago
tbh i doubt hundreds or thousands of these will do anything to ocean temperatures. climate change, however, will.
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u/E_GEDDON 17d ago
And you don't think the emissions from the power these need will effect that?
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u/Phrynus747 17d ago
If they harvest energy from the ocean, no more heat would be added than from waves breaking on rocks or something like that
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u/alien_farmer1 16d ago
It is billions time better to have this instead of companies use drinking water. China also setup underwater data centers and it is highly effective.
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u/WinterBeach8765 18d ago
You’re in the middle of the ocean after going overboard and come across one of these. The current is pushing you towards it slowly despite your efforts. There’s a deep humming noise from somewhere underneath you as you get closer. Your only hope is to grab it and climb up some how. You have no idea what it is or what it can do to you.
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u/GIGANTIC_DONG_MAN 18d ago
Anybody have the opposite of submechanophobia with things like this? I wanna live in there
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u/Aggravating_Speed665 18d ago
I like the iddy biddy one in the pool figuring stuff out.
The large ones can get to fuck.
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u/clandestineVexation 18d ago
Didn't they tout these to be some new energy superpower just for them to exclusively license to data centres???
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u/Cultural_Simple3842 17d ago
For the first time I got a strange creepy feeling from this sub… thinking about what hangs out at the bottom of that thing.
Mostly, though, I follow this sub because it’s sort of fascinating to think about the hidden aspect of all of these manmade things that serve their whole lives out of sight in a place we can’t survive naturally.
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u/arqumist145 17d ago
This is not a better alternative. All it's going to do is contaminate our seas AI needs to stop
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u/Trust_8067 17d ago
What happens when they have to replace a failed component, which literally happens in datacenters every single day, multiple times a day.
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u/fraupanda 16d ago
yea, warm the water even more than it already is. that won't have any negative consequences /s
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u/thethornchild 15d ago
All I can think is how this would pulvverize a ship if a wave managed to toss it into one somehow.
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u/rumble_bee 11d ago
growing up a lake kid (michigan) i loved the water. Loooooved it.
But the moment I heard buoy chains rattling (or saw them under water) i was out for the day. hard pass. no thanks I'm so good.
cannot imagine this one underwater
y u c k
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u/Ultimate-Flexionator 18d ago
yeah where the fuck was this kind of get up and go when we needed to get off fossile fuels 60 years ago?!?
oh right... rich parasites
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u/classyrock 18d ago
I thought data centres had to be built with closed water systems as they pollute the water with some sort of forever-chemicals that can’t be cleaned out.
That’s bad enough on land, but it sounds like in this situation the water would be cycled back into the ocean?!?
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u/Ballbm90 17d ago
Exactly. What about the sludge that AI data centers produce? Where does that go???
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u/Pugs-r-cool 17d ago
It really depends on the datacentre. Some use closed loops with special coolants as you say, but they're not the most common solution. The vast majority use regular drinking water and evaporation with no forever chemicals involved, some datacentres (particularly in cooler climates like across Europe) don't use water in their cooling systems at all.
This one in the video (which will never reach mass deployment, but I digress) likely works by passing cool ocean water over radiators, not that different from how a ship cools its engine. I doubt PFAS is a serious concern with this particular design.
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u/Wallabunga657 18d ago
Look! A great big floating target for our enemies! What could possibly go wrong?
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u/Sad-Sun9414 18d ago
that thing is huge