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Ben Silone

@bsilone • 2,912 subscribers

Building a better future, on our oceans, and beyond Founder, husband, father, futurist, Jesus follower, e/acc

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Building gigawatt scale datacenters in the oceans may be even easier than I had previously thought. Normally for OTEC cold deep sea water and warm surface waters are needed. Because that gigawatt is generating a lot of heat as an end product of compute, along with some additional solar thermal collection, we won’t need warm surface water at all, allowing these datacenters to go almost anywhere with enough depth. Additionally, that gigawatt of heat may be hotter than surface seawater normally used for OTEC, allowing for much shallower piping (200m instead of 1000m) while also being more efficient. The availability of unlimited cold water for the condenser is the key factor we can’t replicate on land. This brings the potential energy generation for ocean based compute up from 10 terawatts to potentially thousands of terawatts, as the locations are not limited to areas with the warmest surface waters. The excess energy needed for hundreds or thousands of people to also live on these structures is minimal compared to that needed for compute.

Building gigawatt scale datacenters in the oceans may be even easier than I had previously thought. Normally for OTEC cold deep sea water and warm surface waters are needed. Because that gigawatt is generating a lot of heat as an end product of compute, along with some additional solar thermal collection, we won’t need warm surface water at all, allowing these datacenters to go almost anywhere with enough depth. Additionally, that gigawatt of heat may be hotter than surface seawater normally used for OTEC, allowing for much shallower piping (200m instead of 1000m) while also being more efficient. The availability of unlimited cold water for the condenser is the key factor we can’t replicate on land. This brings the potential energy generation for ocean based compute up from 10 terawatts to potentially thousands of terawatts, as the locations are not limited to areas with the warmest surface waters. The excess energy needed for hundreds or thousands of people to also live on these structures is minimal compared to that needed for compute.

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