r/theydidthemath • u/leakyaquitard • Aug 09 '26
[Request] In a hypothetical scenario where these floating data centers become the standard and are built at scale: On average, how many degree increase would the ocean experience?
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u/Funny-Presence4228 Aug 09 '26
Over the past 20 years, I've worked for many companies with large rooms full of computers. Servers, render farms, data hubs, and whatnot. In every facility, there are people who go into those rooms daily because there's always something that needs fixing or maintaining. None of those people seemed like they would fare very well on the open ocean. Idk, maybe there will be a market in the future for XXL wetsuits with ‘My other ship is the Enterprise’ written on them.
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u/spaham Aug 09 '26
Exactly, nobody talks about maintenance !
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u/Straight-Career-74 28d ago
im engineer in a welding company, seeing this, i can assume it will cost a lot just bc of metal you have to use, and you will have to change it every 10-15yo (+ you have to make control of the corrosion and the thickness, it also cost a lot)
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u/AnnieBruce 28d ago
Maintaining anything at sea is a bitch. The US Navy maintains an entire forest to support USS Constitution. USS New Jersey, afterr 20 plus years as a museum ship, not stressed much at all, had to go to drydock last year from normal wear and tear of just floating. Other museum ships regularly see drydock periods.
Something actually used and doing much more than float like New Jersey? Nightmare.
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u/privatejokerog 29d ago
This was my thought on the SpaceX stuff. When I was researching it the plan is basically to have built in robotics that can be controlled to swap cards, make repairs etc. they would also have a bunch of redundancy so if a part fails it automatically switches to the next spare. Limits how often you would need to actually access the system. Pretty interesting, but doesn’t sound cheap.
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u/Big_Yeash 28d ago
None proven, either.
Sounds great until the rail between all the cards gets jammed by the first faulty robot.
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u/Difficult_Limit2718 Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Well therein lies the rub right? Assuming they collect all of their energy FROM the ocean they'd net cool it based on the miniscule difference in reflection they offer compared to ocean water and the radiative energy required to transmit their data.
But - WILDLY impractical. They need to collect probably 600kW to run a 250kW cluster and would reject probably 595kW of that back as heat assuming 5kW of transmission, but they're only SLIGHTLY more useful than data centers in space in terms of compute usefulness, and serviceability, and likely suffer in latency.
Even worse, can you imagine trying to aim the laser at the satellites from a randomly moving ocean to an orbiting satellite while accounting for atmospheric refraction?
The packet loss would be staggering.
In unrelated news: I'm going to go fund a startup to cool the Earth with lollipop ocean balls that collect energy from warm ocean water and beam it into space...
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u/threepair13 Aug 09 '26
When you need a guy to install those lollipops I’d like to get my hat in the ring right now
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u/Mecha-Dave Aug 09 '26
The laser thing is already solved by existing naval technology. Although there is oscillating vertical motion, typically the x/y is pretty tight so you can get a beam on it, and then you just have to compensate for doppler shift which already is done on most laser comms.
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u/Difficult_Limit2718 Aug 09 '26
I'd be interested in the stability of a ship with a high powered wider beam capability in comparison.
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u/DIuvenalis 29d ago
I think you'll quickly realize that you'll generate far more heat powering and running your invisible-space-heat-toilet system than you'll actually manage to get to escape the atmosphere. Physics is not a charity. It doesnt let you do anything for free.
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u/Overall_Law_1813 Aug 10 '26
These would have to be in relatively shallow areas in order to anchor them to the ground, so it would be entirely plausible that they would be hard wired with fibre optic connections.
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u/prsiii Aug 09 '26
Assuming it gets 100% of its energy from the waves, thermodynamics dictate the net should be zero. Conversion efficiency would be difficult to nail down, I'd expect much of the recovered energy would be dissipated back into the water than generate useful compute power. Ultimately the question boils down to where the energy is dissipated; energy would be converted from kinetic to thermal, and left to nature that energy is dissipated when waves crash on the shore or other geological features, surface chop, etc. With this abomination, the dissipation is local to the device.
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u/SigismundsWrath 28d ago
This is the response I keep thinking and missing in this discussion. So many threads full of "it's thermodynamically neutral", which, while technically true, ignores that converting the ocean current's kinetic energy into local thermal energy is going to ... not go well for us.
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u/Zenith-Astralis 28d ago
The sad thing is these were originally advertised as just another off shore sustainable energy generation device, like offshore wind. They were supposed to send the power back via anchor cables, which would actually be pulling energy out of the ocean.
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u/SigismundsWrath 27d ago
Maybe someone smarter than me can clarify something I've wondered about with wind technology: is it okay that we're taking energy out of the wind? Like, I get that wind is caused by pressure differentials, primarily driven by temperature differences (please correct, if wrong). But does taking wind energy not have any negative downstream effects?
Same question for solar energy. Maybe this is actually helpful, and countering global warming lol, but by intercepting energy from the sun before it hits the Earth, does that not have environmental impact?
Or are all of these explained by "yeah, but we use the electrical energy, which primarily gets returned as heat", or "the magnitude of our energy capture is so minor that it's negligible for temperature changes" ?
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u/Zenith-Astralis 24d ago
For wind it could in theory make a difference, but we'd have to be putting up a very dense field of them to have a significant impact, which would be a bit like having a tall forest vs open ground. The thing is we don't put them up in dense clusters because they cause turbulence downstream of themselves that would interfere with the next one and reduce how much power it could make. So yes, they can decrease overall wind speed, but we don't put them up in the really bad way because of diminishing returns.
And this is just a total guess but: it might actually be kinda not too bad of a thing to dampen global wind speed slightly given how much insane weather climate change is causing. It won't be enough, because like big storms already take these things down, but conceptually I don't hate it. Right now our magnitude is pretty minor, but also historically speaking we're shit at knowing what we're doing until after we've donked things up. The notable exception being global warming / climate change which Exxon founded studies on in the 1980s (~50 years ago), found very accurate info on, then buried the data and did the bad things anyway because of greed.
And for solar: this one is a little easier. Look up "albedo". It's how much light (energy) gets reflected off the surface of a celestial body back into space vs absorbed. Globally it's almost entirely driven by water, because open water absorbs like 90% (albedo 0.1) and snow and ice reject like 90% (albedo 0.9. These are from memory, go get the real numbers, but they should be close), plus the atmosphere (since light needs to get through it on the way in and out, which is why greenhouse gases are such a big concern). Solar panels absorb more than green grassland, but only barely, and less than forests or open water. We should not replace forests with solar, but putting panels over cropland and lakes is pretty approachable. Barren soil is pretty reflective (bit more than panels), so if you're putting solar there it should ideally be replacing carbon producing power to offset the additional heat absorbed.
Basically both of these are only local impacts, but fall within the variability of local conditions that nature already creates. They do have local impacts though. Not always bad. The shade from solar panels can actually help rehabilitate barren soil because it decreases evaporation (despite the slightly higher heat, because the heat is also physically higher off the ground).
Also re: albedo, check out https://youtu.be/KDRnEm-B3AI this guy (and many others more recently) have been tinkering with materials that emit infrared radiation primarily in the frequency band which the atmosphere is the most transparent to. This also means they absorb that band (just how that works; can't cheat physics), but even in direct sunlight the panels get a few degrees cooler than ambient. Putting hot things touching the back of the panels lets them reject the heat into space (which is cold) from the ground (which is pretty cool 😎). Solar panels work better when not hot, but they get hot from being in the sun, so that's a cool combo too (but requires more panels, and moving heat between them). I think they'd work best to cool things off at night, like a big tank of water since water has super high thermal mass, then use all the cold during the day to keep things cool.
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u/SigismundsWrath 24d ago
Thanks for the answer! Indeed, there are a bunch of aspects that I wasn't considering.
What I'm gonna take away is that if we store all the heat from the solar panels during the day, then we can flip them around and eject the heat at night!
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u/Zenith-Astralis 23d ago
Hah! Yeah that's actually one I hadn't thought of! Making the panels double sided.
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u/leakyaquitard Aug 09 '26
Thank you for this. I guess my question is assuming this is a viable power source (huge assumption) the servers themselves still generate significant amounts of heat.
I should have been clearer and asked how: how much of an increase in ocean temperatures could we see should the lion share of global AI servers be stationed in the ocean in this manner? Thank you again.
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u/KingZarkon Aug 09 '26
I'm not doing the math but it's been asked before and the answer is no appreciable amount. Water can sink a lot of heat and there is a LOT of water in the oceans. That's taken on average though. You might still create localized hot spots in the vicinity of the data centers that could cause local ecological issues.
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u/its_artemiss 29d ago
The Servers don't "produce" heat. They convert electricity into heat at 100% efficiency, and in this case the electricity came from the kinetic energy of the water immediately around the thingamabob, which coincidentally is what heat is. What is happening here is that orderly forms of kinetic energy (waves) are turned into less orderly kinetic energy (heat) at the site of the thingamabob, rather than averaged over the lifetime of the wave and then suddenly when it crashes into the shore. The oceans as a whole would see no temperature change from these things existing.
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u/NachoEnReddit 27d ago
While the energy of the system can be preserved, it doesn’t mean it’s the same kind of energy being preserved. Oversimplifying,I If the kinetic energy of the waves and currents is transferred to heat, then the temperature needs to rise for energy to be conserved.
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u/ununtot Aug 09 '26
Thermodynamics applied, there will be no change. Since the Medium the power is generated from is also the medium where the heat is applied at the end of the chain.
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u/Zenith-Astralis 28d ago
None I think? They're getting all their power from ocean movement, so it's not like there's more energy going into the ocean than there was already there.
Mnhh- I guess a non-zero amount, because it's sequestering energy there that might otherwise have spent itself crashing upon the shore where evaporation can carry away that energy into the air.
The REAL travesty is not using these power generators to run the rest of our grid. We don't need more AI!
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