China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center In Sea With Power of 6 Million PCs (interestingengineering.com) 70
According to China Daily, China has become the world's first nation to deploy a commercial data center underwater. Interesting Engineering reports: China's attempts to set up a commercial data center underwater are the result of a public-private enterprise involving the China Offshore Oil Engineering Co., the country's largest Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation (EPCI) company in the country, and Highlander, a private data center company. Although details of the computing hardware have not been shared, Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater modules is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds.
The computing hardware is packed inside a watertight storage module and together weighs 1,300 tons. The module is being submerged about 115 feet (35 m) under the water, a process that takes about three hours. Although work on installing the first module has begun, Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such modules at the site and build a capacity of nearly six million computers working at a time. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat which will be naturally cooled by the surrounding sea water. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity that would have otherwise been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land.
Additionally, the facility, which is expected to be in place by 2025, will also save 732,000 square feet (68,000 square meters) of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105,000 tons of fresh water, which would be used for cooling efforts. The modules have been built to last 25 years, but a lot remains unknown about how the construction will be impacted by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in setting these centers up is fairly limited to the tests it carried out in January of 2021 in the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.
The computing hardware is packed inside a watertight storage module and together weighs 1,300 tons. The module is being submerged about 115 feet (35 m) under the water, a process that takes about three hours. Although work on installing the first module has begun, Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such modules at the site and build a capacity of nearly six million computers working at a time. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat which will be naturally cooled by the surrounding sea water. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity that would have otherwise been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land.
Additionally, the facility, which is expected to be in place by 2025, will also save 732,000 square feet (68,000 square meters) of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105,000 tons of fresh water, which would be used for cooling efforts. The modules have been built to last 25 years, but a lot remains unknown about how the construction will be impacted by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in setting these centers up is fairly limited to the tests it carried out in January of 2021 in the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.
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the US will just reprint some more money (Score:1)
Remember, who's got the dollar bill press?
This will crash the value of the dollar but who's holding on these trillions?
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This will crash the value of the dollar but who's holding on these trillions?
Mostly American citizens.
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"The US owes them 14 TRILLION DOLLARS and they can demand it back at any time"
let me guess, NOT China?
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Epic scene, future US leader meets China leader at summit where China demands repayment, hands him 14 newly minted US Trillion dollar coins.
The world continues without pause
Re: China (Score:3, Insightful)
China accumulates USD by selling the US stuff. They trade that USD for US bonds so they can earn interest. The bonds aren't redeemable before maturity. At any time, the US govt can create $14T to repay the bonds in cash. The Chinese bondholders don't really want to redeem their bonds, since then they're back to holding cash, which isn't paying interest.
US stuff buyers also ended up with $14T worth of stuff, which matches exactly the $14T that Chinese stuff sellers exchanged for the bonds.
Around it goes. Tha
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The US Treasury bonds are the only hard currency that China holds, since their own money is state-controlled and too soft for any other country to accept it as payment [carnegieendowment.org]
As always, Trade Supports Peace [adb.org] and people arguing against it are working at the behest of the military industrial complex [wikipedia.org]
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China can only "demand" that whatever contracts it has entered into are followed.
Her only recourse is to bring whatever claims it has in a US court.
Also, the US doesn't owe China 14 trillion dollars, sorry.
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China now owns less than $1T of US government debt. And they can only "demand" it back when it matures, not at "any time". They can, of course, sell it on the open market (probably taking a loss on some of it due to recent interest rate increases).
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No, they cannot. And, by the way, China only holds ~800B of US Treasury notes.
Treasury bills have maturity dates. This, by definition, means they CANNOT demand it back at any time.
Please go read even the most basic information about how shit works before anonymously posting complete horseshit. Thanks.
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No, they cannot. And, by the way, China only holds ~800B of US Treasury notes.
Correct. China and other big UST holders have been selling for years. The whole "hyperinflation due to foreign held USTs" scenario has not played out nor does it appear to be a likely factor in future inflation as China and Japan have already drawn down too far. I do think that Japan's central bank may be tempted to sell USTs and buy Yen if they run out of JCB FX dollars of which they have a $110B worth [bloomberg.com], but that's only worth another $1.1T [statista.com], which is big, but significantly less than our deficit spending [taxfoundation.org] whic
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I can demand it too.
China would be about as successful as I am.
25-year lifetime? (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of forecast do they have for process scaling if they think people will want to use these modules 25 years from now, rather than replacing them with the new energy-efficient hotness five years from now?
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What kind of forecast do they have for process scaling if they think people will want to use these modules 25 years from now, rather than replacing them with the new energy-efficient hotness five years from now?
Hotness? No - that's why they're submerging it in the ocean...
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Just what I thought - the hardware will be out of date in 5 years, who cares if it lasts 5 times as long?
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Think of all you could do with your 20-year-old laptop over the next 5 years.
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i refuse to update my win 3.1. 3.11 is overrated
Re: 25-year lifetime? (Score:2)
They donâ(TM)t expect the hardware to be useful 25 years from now; but they aim for a 25 year lifespan to give themselves some margin for error. If they cheaper out and aimed for a 5 year lifespan, and were unlucky, they might have a dead system in one year.
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There is a huge difference between "built to last 25 years" and 25-year (200,000-hour) MTBF given standard assumptions. The most standard assumption is constant failure rate, which is roughly true along the bottom of the "bathtub curve". However, a huge number of components in these computers will wear out over a shorter time, so the failure rate will increase dramatically before the claimed lifetime. It's disingenuous to conflate them.
In the best case they're expecting about 2% failure rate per year, if
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If they're like any other Chinese infrastructure project it will implode in a 2-3 years, so this problem solves itself!
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Built to last 25 years doesn't necessarily mean a service life of 25 years, it means a very low failure rate over say 5 years.
Of course they could refurbish them, replacing the computers and keeping parts like the heat exchange system.
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What kind of forecast do they have for process scaling if they think people will want to use these modules 25 years from now, rather than replacing them with the new energy-efficient hotness five years from now?
The fact that data centers existed 25 years ago. And they're still the "hotness".
You act like humans will stop making data anytime soon. Also known as that "thing" data centers kind of exist for.
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Err... it's not like those 25-year old data centers are still running the same hardware they were in 1998. The hardware has changed (radically). Now, if you sink the datacenter into the sea, there is no "servicing."
To put this into perspective: "would you be interested in using (and paying for) 6 million 300MHz Pentium IIs for a project today?"
It's not going to happen! (Score:2)
Homer, that's your solution to everything: to move under the sea.
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It's far easier to swap out equipment when it's not under 30+ meters of ocean water, and raising it up out of the water means losing the cooling for all the equipment in the submerged box, probably necessitating an extended outage for the customers of that unit.
If they have multiple boxes with spare capacity and good enough virtualization / workload management they could probably "cordon and drain" a box before lifting it for maintenance, but it's still orders of magnitude more work than walking to rack 35,
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Or, better yet, how are they planning to get 25 years out of whatever storage devices they put in it? No rotating-rust disk is going to last that long, and no SSD will last that long before the flash cells expire.
Do they need to have a servicing agent gear up for a scuba dive to replace a failed fan or power supply?
Did they build in like 10x redundancy so that when they have inevitable equipment failure, they can just tombstone that device and send a signal to power up a nearline spare?
Seems like a lot of
Let's Boil the Sea (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure this won't destroy all the fish who prefer cold water.
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Before it boils, it will get warmer, bit by bit, which will for a while produce bigger fish.
You should see what carps grow in the warm water channel of the outer cooling loop of our nuclear power plant. Real little Godzilas.
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Simpson's did it!
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Indeed it won't. Fish are one of the few animals that no one is worried about when discussing elements of ocean heating (both local and global). They are quite mobile creatures. Coral on the other hand is an entirely different matter. But China doesn't exactly have the best track record of giving a shit about reefs: https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
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If by "destroy" do you mean make a huge fish soup... free lunch!
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I'm sure this won't destroy all the fish who prefer cold water.
We should start policing all the humans that piss in the oceans first. You know, because harm.
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Frankly speaking, they are more likely "fishing" for some cia submarine trying to eavesdrop
Not quite first (Score:3)
Some prior art in this area: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
ocean warming (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see an issue with this if it's done at scale - coastal ocean regions being warmed by several degrees and killing off coral and other sensitive marine life. Which impacts the foodchain.
Another bonus is that once these things have reached their service life and are too expensive to remove/dispose properly, you just leave them to rot in the ocean! Out of sight, out of mind.
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These are people who paint mountains green.
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Given all the other shit we dump which doesn't kill the reefs, I suspect an increase of 0.00001 degrees won't matter.
Anyway these things won't generate enough heat to matter. No one will use them. They make no sense.
This has been done before. And failed every time. I still don't see AWS building out all new ocean floor data centers. If this was useful they'd be doing it in production.
Not a problem (Score:2)
I can see an issue with this if it's done at scale - coastal ocean regions being warmed by several degrees and killing off coral and other sensitive marine life
Not an issue, if that starts to happen you just move them on top of the polar ice caps so any heat causes the ice caps to melt and run into the ocean, cooling it again. Just repeat until satisfied with the result!
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Why does eveyone assume it will kill off coral?
If you start with water that's too cold for coral, this will create NEW environments that coral can thrive in
Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center In Sea With Power of 6 Million PCs
I didn't know it would take that much power to sink it. :-)
Or did they mean "China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center, With the Power of 6 Million PCs, Into the Sea"?
Less Interesting (Score:2)
All done by "country's largest EPCI company in the country" ...
(This text is still in the [not so] Fine Article.)
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China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center In Sea With Power of 6 Million PCs
I didn't know it would take that much power to sink it. :-)
Or did they mean "China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center, With the Power of 6 Million PCs, Into the Sea"?
"No more tequila!" "No, more tequila!" Commas matter.
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Let's go eat, Grandma!
The panda eats, shoots and leaves.
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China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center In Sea With Power of 6 Million PCs
Or did they mean "China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center, With the Power of 6 Million PCs, Into the Sea"?
It still means the same thing, or at least, it still has the potential to be read the wrong way.
Perhaps better might be something along the lines of "China sinks 6 million PC equivalent, 1400-ton, data centre in the sea".
Built to last 25 years... (Score:2)
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The barnacles will have ruined the heat transfer in three years. They will have to pull the modules up for sandblasting and repainting. This will also be the time for upgrades and replacements. Then back in the water.
The hull should last 25 years easily.
Curious (Score:3, Insightful)
They're doing this first one off of Hainan Island, which is in the rough area where China has been claiming territory and building artificial islands. Am I being overly cynical if I expect they intend to use the soon-to-come clusters of these underwater data centers as another way to start stealing - I mean claiming - more area that is currently considered international waters?
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lol, hawaii? 100% of "american" territory is stolen land.
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You are being too cynical. Why would they go to the effort of sinking a datacentre there when they have a tried and proven track record of just dumping some cement on a reef and declaring it an island of theirs.
Re: Curious (Score:2)
Interesting to use the metric processed HD images per second. Processed in what way? It is a meaningless metric. In any case, it points to surveillance footage, or still images and video frames.
There is no need to think about upgrading an existing system, they will be only adding more units with newer tech to process larger amounts of HD images per second.
The maths seems well off here. (Score:1)
Magnificent strategy for a rapidly-warming planet. (Score:3)
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It should still be better to the environment than the same hardware on land, as explained.
I'm not saying it won't happen (Score:1)
732,000 square feet or 68,000 square meters (Score:4, Informative)
The land area of China is 9,596,960 square km [wikipedia.org], and .000068 / 9,596,960 is 7.08557709941e-12, so the land use savings is .000000000708557709941 percent, clearly a significant amount.
Press release math is universal, transcending nationality, language, race, gender, age, or any other category you can think of.
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They probably want the data centre to be close to populated areas, to keep latency low. CDNs need to be physically near the users.
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Waste of energy (Score:5, Informative)
What a waste of energy. Instead of the effort to place it in the ocean, place it in an area that has colder climate, run the heat from the servers through a heat pump so it can be used for district heating.
Defensive Military Value (Score:2)
Wonder what they'll use it for (Score:3)
"Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater modules is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds. "
Now why would the Chinese want to process loads of HD images every few seconds....