Modern Data Centers: Underwater, on the water and underground

The form factors and ways of placing data centers are becoming very different. Over the past few years data centers have been placed in the most unusual places, including the bottom of the ocean, dry cargo barges, etc. Most likely, this trend will continue, and in the near future we will see even more unusual projects. As for the existing ones, we will talk about them further on.

Underwater data centers

It all started with Microsoft, the company decided that a cistern with servers placed inside, lowered to the bottom of the sea, was a great prototype for the data center of the future. By the way, the idea turned out to be viable both for the corporation itself and for other companies. Microsoft has developed several versions of an underwater data center, and they have all been successfully tested. There were no problems at all.

Then Chinese companies took advantage of the idea of the American corporation. They liked it all so much that the authorities of several major Chinese cities from different provinces decided to build new underwater data centers, and on a much larger scale than Microsoft projects. The company Beijing Highlander Digital Technology Co. has gone furthest and has already assembled its underwater systems on an industrial scale. According to new data, underwater data centers will soon appear in the coastal waters of regions such as Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP), the Great Bay region of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao (GBA), the Yangtze Delta and the Bohai Rim Economic Circle (BREC).

Subsea Cloud went even further and decided to flood data centers not near the shore, but at a depth of about 3 kilometers. According to the authors of the project, this will reduce PUE even more, since the water is always cold at this depth. The current design of the project assumes placing up to 800 servers in one module, which is very good. Delays, according to the developers, will be reduced by 98% and carbon dioxide emissions by 40%.

On the water data centers

There is a working commercial data center on water. It was developed and built by Nautilus Data Technologies. The company's engineers began working on their idea back in 2015, and gradually brought the concept to practical implementation.

src: datacenterknowledge.com

The data center is located on a barge, which means that, if necessary, it can be towed to the shores of any country in the world. In case someone needs additional computing resources. It is not possible to deploy an onshore data center for a short period of time, but a data center on the water... - is quite a solution. Among the advantages is the availability of water, which is used as an element of cooling system. Well, the cost of a flooded data center is less than an object of similar capacity, which is located on land somewhere in Singapore, where the land is extremely expensive.

Underground data centers

there are more such projects. For example, one of the data centers is located deep underground in Norway. It is a large data center with an area of 14,000 square meters.

src: datacenters.com

It is cooled by cold (about 8°C) water, which is always available. There is so much of it in the fjord that heating a small volume has no effect.