108
Who else foresees environmental problems with this later down the line?
(news.microsoft.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
108 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37745 readers
216 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
How much is it going to heat the local area? Along with disk and rack design testing, are they also testing how this thing affects wildlife?
The appeal is understandable: proximity to population centers, temperature, security, scaling with renewable tech, etc.
I wonder if international waters is their end goal. Self-reliant, off-grid data centers that only abide by MS rules.
Everything has to be cooled, it's a question of efficiency. Directly exchanging the heat into cold water is arguably better than expending fossil fuels to generate electricity to pump the heat out of your servers and into the atmosphere. You get multiple losses with current technology: fossil fuel efficiency losses, electric line losses, air conditioning efficiency losses. And the additional electrical generation dumps more CO2.
Oh no doubt. It makes a great deal of sense.
I'm just curious what the actual heat output is (avg, min, max, in vs out), and what the environmental impact is.
Will there be biofouling because the warm seawater is desirable?
Will it even be viable offshore from places like Miami?
Can it produce too much heat for the local environment? Probably not one, but what about after this scale-up with renewables like the article mentions?
At what scale would it begin to disrupt things like the AMOC?