There are already llava/magma vents in the ocean... But the thought of human heat being added makes me upset because it's just another piece.

Microsoft and Google both prototyped it. FWIW, they didn't take it to production once the data was collected.

IIRC, cooling worked fine if placed in the right place with circulation, but maintenance and part replacement was a major issue.

Quick! The oceans aren’t heating up fast enough! ‍️

Sounds like a great idea. OTOH, impossible to calculate the damage to local ecosystems vs. traditional methods.

Totally uneducated guess: Probably better? Cooling is a major power suck, as well as consuming water.

Roughly 40 percent of the electricity consumed by an ordinary data center is for this purpose.

We're draining aquifers that take thousands of years to build up. Don't read up on that, it's horrifying. So if we have to have data centers, I'm gambling that underwater is the lesser of two evils.

If we can't stop the energy from being used anyway, why not make a desalination plant out of it too?

I get it, truly, but we've been dejecting heat to the ocean for a good while. Ocean water cools marine engines and equipment, and heck we use rivers to cool lots of things -- even reactors, which ends up back in the ocean. Data center cooling might be one of the more responsible uses because it's (hopefully) not leeching petroleum or radioactive byproducts into the water.

I'm actually a little more upset now than when I started this comment.

>:(

maintenance and part replacement was a major issue

That was my first thought: who's going to be the underwater IT guy?

America is putting data centers in the deserts of Arizona because it’s fucking stupid.

Good point, I'm betting the overlap of "IT-skilled" and "loves to dive and the outdoor" is rather thin.