Comment by CuriouslyC

A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.

It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.

One huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency.

The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.

NIMBY stuff is an issue too, I live in AK and would love if we started building them, but there are infrastructure problems and then people who have never worked in the arctic frantically pitching a fit about caribou they’ve never seen.

NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”

>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.

Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.

Huh. I thought the field had mostly soured on wave power due to the incredible engineering challenges. Cheaper+easier to do wind or solar. I guess you can slap “For AI” onto anything to overcome the economics.

> I think the specific attraction to space is the copious massive amounts of free solar energy, isn't it?

Yes you get more energy harvest from solar above the atmosphere and can orient them to always be pointed towards the sun. But it is still so much more expensive than building out conventional solar in the Sun Belt, which is so much more expensive than just building a massive natural gas plant right next to people's homes.

No, space is desirable because there is no local permitting authority that can push back. People living near data centers have gotten wise to the fact that local people pay most of the externalities of data centers and AI, but the benefits mostly go elsewhere, and the jobs created during construction are temporary. In space, you don't have to lobby/bribe local politicians and astroturf a YIMBY movement.

That is a problem, but you already have to contend with GPU refresh every ~6 years, it's likely you'd pre-build pods that you could sink and link, then you'd float them and refurbish at refresh time. With that cycle time it's a manageable engineering challenge.

No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there.

He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.