The article mentions that one of the benefits is that they don't have to deal with building codes being different in different places. It's truly an "off the shelf" data center that doesn't have to be customized for the laws, zoning, and codes in that area.
But who is in charge of the seabed around the United States? I imagine that I can't just drop a big metal container on the ocean floor without informing someone or asking permission, otherwise there would be a lot of things just dumped out there.
I also wonder about jurisdiction. If the data center is outside of the Territorial Zone (12 nautical miles from shore) but is inside of the 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which country would jurisdiction fall under? The country that owns the EEZ? Would the data center fly a flag of its owning country? Perhaps the country where the cabling comes ashore?
Some interesting legal questions. Perhaps the datacenter would be treated like a submarine in terms of jurisdiction. It could allow Microsoft to have their Irish branch open data centers 13 nautical miles offshore of the West Coast to provide storage that's harder for the US to legally get into.
Definitely curious about the jurisdiction aspects here. There aren't any immediate cases that come to mind re stuff outside EEZs (I wonder if there's any precedent associated with oil rigs - they're the only freestanding marine structures that immediately come to mind, besides artificial islands).
One thing that does stand out is the sheer greyness of it all - international legal matters like this move very slowly and moreover the ICJ seems very poorly equipped to answer questions like this.
Let's say climate change gets absolutely horrific, and we see a 1m rise in sea levels over the course of a pod's 10 year lifespan. So your underwater datacenter pod, originally deployed 200m below the surface, is now at 201m. Somehow I don't think this would be an enormous problem.
A similar argument could be made for concerns over rising water temperatures as a result of climate change - what might be considered a dramatic rise to climate scientists and marine biologists would likely have little impact on a datacenter.
Forget climate scientists and marine biologists -- if ocean temperatures rise 3-4 degrees, we will all have much bigger problems than increased datacenter cooling costs.
But Marine Law seems to have a healthily deep section in the legal bookstore I visited too frequently, not long ago.
I imagine this plan means to situate in littoral waters, not treaty open seas.
But what hazard could chipping containers packed with servers be?
I guess there is rare element pollution all too plenty, oozing from recycles in countries where had currency at all, means only barely just hard, not harsh life. But relativism appeases not real concerns.
The idea i think has been mentioned a few times by others, if near/offline storage makes any sense, but to some imaginable degree, sea storage of data also offers unusual security against all but highly determined assailants.
Is there any thermal maintenance factor, that means e.g. disk drives last longer with less data loss if kept at stable temperatures? Would that be effective to do at sea - i think this already mentioned too, the narrow bands of temperature required for marine tropical fish, suggests to me that the cost of mitigating heat waves and cold seasons s sure not applicable.
Can wave power be harnessed to circulate enough air?
Can a inexpensive efficient massive area of the structure be made to be a heatsink?
(Marine fouling as mentioned, seems highly challenging, even if access to surface by buoyancy charges is easily achieved.
Can something organic, even living like a coral, be coaxed into providing natural dissipation of any heat excess?
Oh, i'm saddened now, thinking about barren, sterile coasts where coral reefs have died. But would such areas be better to offer minimal marine fouling by lack of support for life in those God forsaken waters of shame?
Are any challenges less, say, in the Great Lakes?
Or installed inline in channels parallel to canals, utilizing water flow controlled often by lock systems, adding emergency cooling capacity? The trenches might easily be dug. In London there are fiber rights of way along many canals as well. My company long looked at using arch space under rail bridges and viaducts, for they are naturally very cool places, and next to fiber and power.*
Is there a military application for designing the containers?
For forward deployment?
Oceanic monitoring of SONAR?
Or required replacement civilian facilities you need to park aways from looting?
Sounds to me like there is utility in having a reference design, and a potential number of platform customers who habitually fund conceptual capabilities.
*(If anyone is seriously interested even for long shot / entertainment value, in containerized colo under London railroad arches, I'd love to hear from you, i'll freely donate some real energy into getting further than we did before recognizing we couldn't sell it to investors as a solo undertaking. (not meaning selling to investors for the idea, but to those in us, who would balk at cost of diversion of time, if undertaken without sharing interests. That said, it was appreciated the excellent security possible, as well as a side idea about possibility to get planning permission for erecting sky poles for microwave parallel to known HTF line of sight paths, as potential backup capacity and even service to colocated compute. Variously quite a number of projects we researched as thoroughly as possible before spending real money progressing.k, i.e. time, thought, desk research, scouting, but nothing like hiring planning lawyers to approach Network Rail et.al., just modestly intelligent motivated daydreaming, as line of sight to a lot of major landmarks seemed very plausible at 1km and under. Absolutely please do drop me a line if it's even just a daydream you agree has a angle to work, email in profile...)
But who is in charge of the seabed around the United States? I imagine that I can't just drop a big metal container on the ocean floor without informing someone or asking permission, otherwise there would be a lot of things just dumped out there.
I also wonder about jurisdiction. If the data center is outside of the Territorial Zone (12 nautical miles from shore) but is inside of the 200nm exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which country would jurisdiction fall under? The country that owns the EEZ? Would the data center fly a flag of its owning country? Perhaps the country where the cabling comes ashore?
Some interesting legal questions. Perhaps the datacenter would be treated like a submarine in terms of jurisdiction. It could allow Microsoft to have their Irish branch open data centers 13 nautical miles offshore of the West Coast to provide storage that's harder for the US to legally get into.