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CuriouslyCtoday at 3:15 PM8 repliesview on HN

Honestly, data centers in the ocean make so much more sense than data centers in space it's kind of silly, but Mr Moneybags owns a rocket company he's trying to pump and dump, not a submarine company, so here we are.


Replies

rtkwetoday at 3:27 PM

It's like the idea of Mars as a backup to human civilization. The technology required to make Mars livable and independent from Earth is so advanced it would allow you to survive basically anything here on Earth already.

elcritchtoday at 5:20 PM

A startup I worked at is building wave-powered data centers [1].

1: https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-building-inferen...

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rbanffytoday at 3:29 PM

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.

It has the killer feature of allowing a human to walk up to a rack and replace a component.

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cyberlimerencetoday at 5:14 PM

I saw this a couple of days ago, you might be interested: 'World’s first wind-powered underwater datacentre starts operating in China' [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/09/worlds-first-w...

hangonhntoday at 3:21 PM

I know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.

arjietoday at 3:38 PM

What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.

To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.

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Zigurdtoday at 3:38 PM

He must have that cave submarine lying around somewhere.

cmrdporcupinetoday at 3:31 PM

Corrosion is one hell of a problem in salt water.

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

(In reality, they want to build the torment nexus at the Lagrange points because that would just be edgy-as-fuck)

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