Whales are “skittish animals,” says Arial Brewer, a beluga researcher at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “A massive-scale project like this could really stress them out in a lot of different ways.”
Data centers, with their thousands of servers, generate considerable heat that can damage equipment if not offset in some way. Land-based facilities use massive amounts of fresh water to cool down. By putting a data center underwater, the ocean can easily dispel that heat. “Cooling is a large part of what a data center costs to run, and seawater is a free sink,” says Vishal Misra, a computer scientist and professor at Columbia University.
Microsoft showed that the concept could work with a pilot project off California in 2015 and another off Scotland a few years later. Currently, there are only two operational underwater data centers in the world, one off the Chinese island of Hainan and another off the coast of Shanghai, and they’re a fraction of the size of the proposed centers at the two U.S. sites.
In the Maine project, a cluster of what official documents call “subsea-compute hives” or “data center pods” would rest on the seabed, powered by up to 50 tidal turbines across 27 acres. In Cook Inlet, the data center would be made up of 66 pods and more than 300 tidal turbines. Its footprint would span 1,650 acres—more than 1,000 football fields.
The locations were chosen by DeepGreen Holdings LLC—a U.S.-based developer—because of their potential for tidal power, which works by harnessing the movement of water.
But each spot is also home to beleaguered groups of whales. A distinct population of around 300 critically endangered beluga whales lives in Cook Inlet. And the Gulf of Maine hosts feeding grounds for the North Atlantic right whale, a species whose numbers have dropped below 400 individuals.
by Ryan Green and Andrea Thompson, Scientific American | Read more:
Image: Hollis Europe & Jacob Barbaro/NOAA Fisheries
[ed. See also: The Trump administration wants underwater datacenters. One Great Lakes non-profit is already preparing (Guardian).]
