A company called Subsea Cloud is preparing an undersea data center off the US coast before the end of 2022, and plans other facilities in the Gulf of Mexico and North Sea.
Subsea plans to put its first commercial pod in the water before the end of this year near Port Angeles, Washington. The company claims that placing its datacenter units underwater can reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40%.
He even mentions that it will likely reduce delays since the datacenter will be located next to cities that are close to the coast.
According to Subsea founder Maxie Reynolds, it can also deploy 1MW of capacity at up to 90 percent less cost than it would take to commission a XNUMXMW plant at a land-based facility.
The Port Angeles facility will include a 20-foot cage. Inside, there will be room for about 16 racks that will house about 800 servers, according to Subsea. If additional capacity is needed, another pod can be added. The pod-to-shore link at this facility will provide 100 Gbps connectivity. The data center will be open for any prospective customer or partner to check out, virtually or otherwise, according to Reynolds. It will be placed in shallow waters, and will be visible from the port, while in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea they are expected to sink to 700-900 feet and 600-700 feet respectively.
Subsea datacenters will be kept cool submerged in water, which will require reduced power and less CO2 emissions. Inside, the servers are also submerged in a dielectric coolant, which can conduct heat but not electricity. However, underwater boxes are designed to passively dissipate heat, rather than using pumps for cooling as is done in land-based data centers.
But what if something goes wrong or a customer wants to replace their servers? According to Subsea, customers will be able to schedule some periodic maintenance, including server replacement. The company says it will take 4-16 hours for a team to arrive at the data center and replace any hardware.
