• This is just a rebranded data center in orbit. Same goal, be completely outside of the law, this time in international waters.

    • Right, then they’ll have to build more aircraft carriers to protect it.

      • If we’re gonna go non-credible-defense, why not add an airstrip to the roof of the data center, and it can manage it’s own protection!

        • 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.

        • So put them where Russia and China’s navies are a problem, but you also have pirates to worry about

  • The best thing Thiel can do for planet Earth is kill himself and his billionaire buddies.

    • 4 days

      Wouldn’t be surprised if they all went to the Football World Cup final this year.

  • Imagine the noise that will create underwater. What a horrible form of torture for all the animals in the water.

  • 3 days

    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.

  • 4 days

    Ah yes. The time-tested strategy of dumping our shit in the ocean.

    • 4 days

      Don’t worry about it. You can’t see it anymore so it’s surely fine!

  • 4 days

    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?

    • 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.

      • 4 days

        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.

        • 4 days

          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

          • 3 days

            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…

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • 4 days

      Not to mention the devastating environmental impact it could have on the marine ecosystem surrounding it.

  • 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.

  • What happened to Mars? Why can’t these people go there and build data centers so we can forget about them.

    • 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.

      • Transmitting power to the mainland was the company’s original pitch. But those cables are expensive so now they are pitching AI workloads in the ocean that will communicate via satellite

      • 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

        • 4 days

          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?

          • 4 days

            Definitely wasteful to convert. I’m guessing the hydrogen is a store for when waves aren’t wavey.