Underwater Data Centers

The cooling of a data center is very criticial to maintain the necessary temperatures. If you want a long life time for your electronic equipments, and to keep your server farm running (also with proper functioning) you must find the cheapest and fastest way of cooling.

Our simple goal in cooling is to move wate heat from the the data center (indoor environment) to the outside so there are lots of options for removing waste heat.

A complete discussion of all the design concepts associated with cooling infrastructure could easily constitute a large book not a blogpost. But you can easliy find a brief overview of the options that can help you determine which route is best for your data center via internet.

But today we will talk on a new way of cooling, “underwater cooling”. The idea to put sealed vessels underwater with computers inside isn’t new but experimentation with liquid immersion cooling has already come to mark the next big wave of technology innovation.

Going under water could solve several problems by introducing a new power source, greatly reducing cooling costs, closing the distance to connected populations and making it easier and faster to set up data centers. Also There are companies that recently completed long experimentation operating an underwater data center. The experiments proves that it is possible to run an underwater data center and this way of cooling offers a viable and highly efficient alternative to their land-based counterparts.

This experiments also shows that to deploy an underwater datacenter takes less time than a standart version which require permits and other time-consuming aspects.

Building a vessel that housed the experimental datacenter only took 90 days. While every datacenter on land needs to be tailored to varying environments and terrains, these underwater containers could be mass produced for very similar conditions underwater, which is consistently colder the deeper it is.

While the threat of data centers overcrowding the ocean may not be a real concern any time soon, environmental impacts are yet to be determined. As well this may lead to more novel security and cybersecurity challenges that we haven't yet considered.