This is just a rebranded data center in orbit. Same goal, be completely outside of the law, this time in international waters.
Lol the space data center crashed, now it’s an ocean data center
Right, then they’ll have to build more aircraft carriers to protect it.
There was the same problem in Space. Russia and China have anti-sat weapons in-orbit pointing at targets already.
So put them where Russia and China’s navies are a problem, but you also have pirates to worry about
I’d assume the US too. I haven’t decided if it’s a problem yet. Just a comment. Still thinking about where this can lead to. I guess what I’m saying is that presumably, naval contractors would support this project, so it has a good chance of going forward.
Calling it now: won’t work, not happening.
How successful was the whole seasteading thing? Yeah.
Half the trick of these rich bastards is to raise money from other rich bastards hoping to become even richer bastards from a good investment. The trick doesn’t require the thing you’re selling to work, even theoretically.
What happened to Mars? Why can’t these people go there and build data centers so we can forget about them.
The best thing Thiel can do for planet Earth is kill himself and his billionaire buddies.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they all went to the Football World Cup final this year.
So I guess the plan is to make a somehow buoyant hyperscaler powered on tidal energy tech which is pretty much still in its infancy, and radiate all the heat in an already too hot ocean?
Lovely idea, Theil, I hope it leaks.
“Reportedly” is carrying a lot of weight here
Fuck Thiel.
Thiel is an enemy of humanity.
Wait, didn’t he talk about the antichrist at a conference, and basically describe himself? Pretty fitting honestly
No, he described socialists 🙄
(Jesus was a socialist)
Literally a vampire.
Germany produced Hitler, Trump and Thiel…
WTF is in the water over there…
So barely being connected to Germany counts as being “produced” by it?
Hitler was born in Austria to Austrian parents and was raised in Germany, sure. You can blame his German upbringing.
But Trump was born in New York. So was his dad. And his mom is from Scotland.
Thiel was born in Germany but his family moved in South Africa when he was an infant and then moved again to the US before he was a teen.
Data centers soon apparently…
I though Thiel was South African?
That’s Musk
Thiel was also raised in South Africa, during apartheid, and was schoolmates with a lot of… shall we say… german speaking individuals
Another fun fact, they imported a bunch of those white Africans to live here lol
You know I’m beginning to think this apartheid thing might have been a bad influence.
Wild thought, but maybe apartheid is bad guys
He’d probably like that.
Then it’s not a startup.
Another libertarian paradise
Ah yes. The time-tested strategy of dumping our shit in the ocean.
Don’t worry about it. You can’t see it anymore so it’s surely fine!
Please, I am begging them to fuck off to their gulch and leave us the fuck alone at last!
Imagine the noise that will create underwater. What a horrible form of torture for all the animals in the water.
Didn’t Microsoft already try this a few years ago, and it didn’t work because it was a frankly stupid idea.
Google did it with containers in the bay, seawater being pumped through heat exchangers. If they couldn’t make it work due to the maintenance when tied to a pier in the bay. These muppets will be shocked at the engineering requirements to do it in the open ocean
Microsoft was trying to build something they could sell for practical reasons as a cheaper alternative to land based data centers. For that purpose it is not cost effective.
Peter Thiel is trying to build something that will not be subject to laws so he can continue to develop horrors beyond human comprehension. For that use case it is possibly very cost effective.
Wasn’t that just underwater data centers that used the surrounding ocean as for cooling?
I don’t remember wave power being a notable part of their plan.(though I may have forgotten a detail or 2 over the years)
Even though it’s renewable energy, it still generates a significant amount of heat.
Can we try cutting down on computing resources wherever possible first?
Can we try cutting down on Peter Thiels?
Yeah seriously, if we could start making software more efficient rather than throwing more hardware at it, we’d be in a much better position environmentally and economically.
Imagine only one thing: the web of the 90s/00s with today’s hardware and bandwidth.
A wet dream. But actually I loaded some pages faster with a 14k4 baud modem than some pages with 5Gbit today. With 47228 frameworks and captchas and …
With every iteration of higher power, programs went shittier, more clogged and devs grew lazy.
The more time goes by, the more I’m interested about software and hardware that tries to do more with less at the consumer and enthusiast level.
Ex: ESP-based projects and products, Meshtastic/MeshCore, eInk-based displays for lower energy consumption, etc
I feel ya. I recently did a shopping-list-app. Wonderfully minimalistic, a simple php-backend and a super simple watch-app as a bonus. And I got sad somehow how superfast the shit is and could even sync when Theres no 4g or 5g. Why does everything has to have 5 updates per minute and each one adding another thing noone wanted just because…subscriptions. Until the simple initial thing is a bloatware-abomination.
I’m tired, boss…
Abstraction layers will be the death of us.
Efficiency is a big deal in datacenters. Aside from the AI bubble, companies actually don’t like lighting money on fire. More efficient hardware saves them lots of money; less hardware, less power, less datacenter space, less maintenance, fewer support contracts, fewer software licenses, etc etc.
While the current splashy “state of the art” models in terms of cognitive ability are American, IMO the real foundation for future AI is coming out of China these days. It’s not quite as smart but they’re focusing heavily on making AI training and inference cheaper in terms of compute (and therefore more efficient in terms of energy usage). It’s a mother-of-invention situation, sure - they’ve been cut off from the latest and greatest NVIDIA cards so they’re having to find ways to make do with less powerful hardware. But that’s going to be super important once AI is “good enough” for various real world tasks and the most powerful models aren’t needed for most activities.
That’s not what I said. We’re using those hardware efficiency gains to offset the performance losses of additional abstraction layers. If we were to make the software more efficient, the hardware efficiency gains would actually be noticeable and we wouldn’t be wasting nearly as much energy overall.
This is all ai compute. Yes modern software is bloated but ai inference currently kind of has to run on gpus.
Not to mention the devastating environmental impact it could have on the marine ecosystem surrounding it.
From a physics standpoint, would the energy from the waves eventually turn to heat anyway through friction and waves crashing onshore? Law of conservation of energy and such? If we’re getting the energy from the ocean and venting it back into the ocean…?
Indeed, it’s basic thermodynamics. The energy coming in to Earth gets turned into heat one way or another, the only question is where that heat goes. In this case it goes into the ocean either way.
I hope the salt water makes these ocean data centers impossible.
Wave power is transmitted back to land, usually, it won’t be a floating data center. At least I doubt it would be, but who knows, they are pretty awful people.
It’s a floating data center. They started out as autonomous hydrogen electrolysis in the middle of the ocean, then shipping liquid hydrogen back to land. Now they pivoted to using the hydrogen to power onboard compute
So they generate electricity from wave power then use that to electrolyze water and put that to a catalyst to generate electricity?
Seems unnecessarily overcomplicated with lots of inefficiencies. Why not just power the computer’s directly?
Definitely wasteful to convert. I’m guessing the hydrogen is a store for when waves aren’t wavey.
