Yeah, at market scale that cannot be good for deep oceans that expect to be cold. Aren't you going to cause a big upwell around the server farm, and destroy that area of the seafloor?
It's really too bad we can't use all that generated heat to heat homes instead.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/cryptocurrency-heater-quarnot/
Chad Gallinat870
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Underwater server farms!!
This is really interesting - novel approach to cooling data centers. I wonder what the impacts on ocean life might be... This will obviously dump heat into the oceans but is it as widely impactful as a warming climate?
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/microsoft-facebook-take-plunge-novel-cloud-cooling-approaches
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/microsoft-facebook-take-plunge-novel-cloud-cooling-approaches
I remember reading something about nuclear power plants dumping heat into the ocean, and how in one instance, it created an artificial place for manatees to gather year round instead of migrating in winter. The point, I mean, is there are probably past examples to look at and it's clear that it will have some impact, though the ocean is absorbing a lot of heat these days as it is.
So, especially in California with it's water crises and Silicon Valley being right there, why don't they combine it with desalination? Create freshwater as a byproduct? At least use the heat energy for something?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261999000719?via%3Dihub
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261999000719?via%3Dihub
Okay, if not using the heat energy for desalination, could one position these things close to river outlets that have problems with dead zones, and create artificial convection currents from the bottom up that could disrupt some of the stagnation at the top and create flow to help disrupt dead zones?
The desal/server farm idea is a very interesting one. Some chips can operate at up to 150C. Unfortunately there are other parts (like HDDs) that die at 85C, but you could cool that hardware first in the loop, warming it before it reaches boil over the CPUs.
I still think you'd need to figure out how to avoid creating a dead zone at the outflow.
An obvious idea proposed many times is to then extract salt from the outflow before it goes back, and sell the sea salt. However, you can't just boil it down like you would in conventional methods - the ocean has a lot more salt. So you'd need a cheap method of reducing that salt in the concentrate (or before) that doesn't poison the water nor require boiling it down. Perhaps ultrafiltration?
I still think you'd need to figure out how to avoid creating a dead zone at the outflow.
An obvious idea proposed many times is to then extract salt from the outflow before it goes back, and sell the sea salt. However, you can't just boil it down like you would in conventional methods - the ocean has a lot more salt. So you'd need a cheap method of reducing that salt in the concentrate (or before) that doesn't poison the water nor require boiling it down. Perhaps ultrafiltration?