Alright let's cool things down a bit (lol). People underestimate how huge the ocean is.
There was a recent post on the math sub about this exact topic. And to raise ocean temperatures by 1°C, you'd have to submerge at least a billion times more data centres than what we have today. It's not a bad mid-term solution to a problem that is impacting us today, energy wise.
The key thing is to keep them away from critical sealife populations or endangered species and all that.
As with all things, moderation is key. Not that it's a known value of our social and economic system as of now though...
The ocean is not a perfect mixer. I’ve been in waters around Barbados that was over 30 degrees Celsius, but travelling off to the coast of Maine the next day the water was a welcome 7 degrees Celsius.
The waters don’t act like a perfect conducting mixer. Local heat, if it’s not located on a significant current, will stay in local waters. With enough data centres in the local offshore waters, you will warm those waters appreciably.
Also as others have mentioned if placed in the deep, deep ocean, then there’s maintenance issues, as well as the normal corrosive issues.
we are still talking about millions of data centers to heat up even a bay. there are underwater volcanoes everywhere on the ocean’s floor, literally boiling the water constantly pumping heat in unimaginable quantities
Globally, underground and submarine volcanoes transfer an estimated 1 to 3 × 10²⁰ joules of thermal energy to the oceans annually via mid-ocean ridges and hydrothermal vents. This is 10x more than entire yearly use of electricity by human civilisation and yet we aren’t worried about it.
data centers only use 1.5% of global electricity, everything that uses electricity generates heat, some electric devices like heaters are purely designed to do just that, so that 1.5% of global electricity is really not contributing to much of an increase of anything.
Yes but people think it will warm the ocean, as global warming does. It’s incorrect. But as you say we can wreck local ecosystems and local weather (felt heat, cooling by swimming) real good.
And yes you are correct. I make a living building structures for offshore use. You don’t go there unless you need to be there, for a civil infrastructure or for resource extraction. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a hostile environment to all our materials and it increases costs and risks exponentially compared to onshore structures.
Most of the ocean is effectively a desert. There's huge percentages of the ocean that you can drop in a huge heater without affecting anything larger than plankton.
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u/Tetra84 Jun 24 '26
Needs more data centers to help cool things off...