The generative AI industry increasingly seems pointless and wasteful. Despite the fact that its products require historic levels of electricity and data (much of which is arguably stolen), the best that the industry has managed to produce has been reams of half-correct (or, in many cases, wholly incorrect) information, racist memes, problematic porn, and a deluge of other auto-generated bullshit that has flooded the internet and made a lot of websites unpleasant to be on.
One of the biggest problems for AI has been its energy footprint. The server farms required to run generative AI require huge amounts of fresh water to cool them. Now, Wired reports that a Bay Area startup believes it has come up with a solution to AI’s energy woes. That solution is to sink large server farms into the San Francisco bay, which will supposedly eliminate the need for data center cooling and thus drop the overall operating cost by a significant amount. The company in question, NetworkOcean, has said that it can lower operating costs for AI companies by 25 percent using its aquatic methods—something that has already been tested by Microsoft and is in active use in China.
“Building a data center costs $10-20 million per MW of power capacity. Two-thirds of this cost is land, building, and cooling infrastructure. A GW facility requires a staggering $10-20 billion investment before purchasing any servers or switches,” the startup says on its blog. The company hopes to test its underwater server farm, which will be protected inside a large metal capsule, in the coming weeks.
The only problem is that NetworkOcean’s upcoming test might not be exactly up to code. Multiple regulatory agencies that Wired talked to—the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board—told the magazine that they had reached out to NetworkOcean to inquire whether the company had secured the proper permits to test its little experiment. The company’s co-founder, Sam Mendel, claims that the test will occur in a “privately owned and operated portion of the bay,” thus placing it outside the realm of regulatory scrutiny.
Researchers interviewed by Wired similarly worried that underwater data centers would disturb the local wildlife and even potentially trigger a toxic algae bloom. “Just because these centers would be out of sight does not mean they are not a major disturbance,” said one expert, Jon Rosenfield, who works at San Francisco Baykeeper, a nonprofit focused on pollution.
Gizmodo reached out to NetworkOcean for comment.
If the idea of using less water to cool servers is appealing, the idea of such a practice being scaled to the size of Silicon Valley’s needs is not. The ocean is already full of human-related junk. I’m not sure it needs a couple thousand new server farms on top of everything else.
