Atomarine: Nuclear Data Centers at Sea

The one thing I enjoy about our AI goldrush driven economy is all the cartoonish cash grabs coming out of the woodwork to try and part investors from their money.

1. 4-5x faster deployment than on land

- Not that this will ever be built but if it were, I assume Newport News or Electric Boat would be fitting the nuclear reactor (unless they cheap out and go with an import). Given they are booked solid until the 2040s somehow this company is even slower than the nuclear industry at building land based plants.

2. 1.5 GW deployed per year

- Starting in which year?

3. 1.1 PUE seawater cooling, modeled.

- Well there you have it, they modeled it, so it's basically already built.

4. 20-40 year infrastructure life

- Remind me how many 20 year old servers are currently running AI workloads? Oh, I guess that just means the ships and the nuclear reactor. I mean I guess that's good, it's not like a building on land would last that long...

Oh but I guess they will just be using LNG to start with, thank goodness that is alot easier to get than nuclear. In fact now is a really good time to start this as I heard there's some companies looking to offload a few LNG tankers somewhere in the gulf for a steal!

Current nuclear-powered ships are run by the world’s premier naval powers and protected by their own stealth or a huge array of armed escort ships.

Have these guys factored in the cost of a task force of protective missile frigates, subs, and destroyers at each site?

"Gas today, nuclear tomorrow" in the power section, with a LNG tanker docked to it.

How do they deal with saltwater corrosion, do the barges go in drydocks after a couple of years? What about weather do they have their own propulsion do they need to be towed to avoid bad weather? Can't you put the same gear in containers next to the shore and avoid the whole weather issue?

With the current capabilities of drone warfare is literally putting ecological bombs near to the shores. Awesome!

Genuinely, have these guys done anything other than AI generated ship pictures? The top down ones look like they didn’t even use a good model.

I’d be stunned if anyone takes this seriously

Sealand[1] is becoming attractive real estate again...

[1] https://sealandgov.org/

I ran the numbers for this about six months ago and it works out a lot better than all the other alternatives.

The fact you're surrounded by coolant, can use intrinsically safe versions of high pressure reactors and have low latency between multiple markets with one datacenter is a big plus.

That you're not competing with humans for electricity or water is another.

That said you'd want to build a semi submersible platform with the nuclear reactors in the pontoons and the superstructure able to house container based datacenter units. The only place with enough experience to build these is South Korea which isn't a deal breaker per se, but Samsung can pretty much eat your lunch if these get successful.

Write up an ai generated biz plan, shop it around quick. make the necessary human pyramid, get it on the stock market. it'll be as irresistible as peanut butter & chocolate. (ai+nuclear.. with a dollop of cheaper than spacex AI buildout). Doesn't matter than solar+batteries might be a BIT safer. (even goat Elon has said we don't need nuclear as we already have a free one that is at a safe distance)

Avoiding legal jurisdiction, regulation and tax by being offshore.

Bring on the exploding drone boats.

Why the website and the images look like AI-generated?

This reminds me of the Pangeos megayacht from a few years back.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pangeos-terayacht-turtle/

TL;DR: Pangeos was a concept for a floating free city that trended a few years back, but was never built for obvious reasons, just like how these floating data centres will never be built. Presumably some people were bilked into paying money to the Pangeos scammers, just like there will be those who "invest" in this.

The problem is that it costs a lot more to put a nuclear reactor into a permanently sea-worthy form-factor than it does to build on land and put up with some pesky taxes. There are plenty of places with lax regulations (environmental and otherwise) that will be happy to let you build whatever size data centre you want if you're willing to build the power generation too.

Sure, lets heat up the oceans even more.

The sensible way would be to use the waste heat for district heating, but let's heat the fish instead

Wasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling?

What happened to that?

Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark.

As of yet I have not seen the use of server racks as structural architectural features. They always seem to need a vast shed that has its own supports, when server racks could also be the walls and supports for much of the building, or some other structure, maybe a road bridge.

So Much land. Even non civilized lands, Even near sea for piping water. What does this idea solve? Or just adds problems like, Non secure assets/nucclear on the sea.

This is a really ambitious and difficult idea. It would be awesome if they can pull it off!

Since most people live near a coast this could power more than just data centers.

Am I the one who's out of touch, or is this absolutely insane? Let me summarize the state of the AI black hole right now:

Data centers! Everyone wants more data centers! But how do I get in on the craze? I think the brightest investors of our generation are hungry for data centers placed in weird places. Space data centers, underwater data centers, data centers in the Earth's core and on a space elevator! I got it - sea data centers! Now, to make this idea not sound crazy, we'll just pretend there's literally not a single shred of buildable land on the entire planet. So now we've established that land data centers suck, all we need to do is to figure out the easy parts, such as shipbuilding, propulsion, creating our own power grid (no worries, we'll just pretend that designing, building, maintaining and scaling a state of the art nuclear reactor at sea is easier than building a power line on land or even just constructing a normal land power plant), repairs, staffing, scaling construction (got to make building ships cheaper than a warehouse) and about a billion other things. I think we'll just try to think of the smallest numbers we can, no one will check. Oh, and since that nuclear thing is so hard, we'll actually just get tons of fossil fuels instead and pollute away in international waters, we promise we'll switch to that miracle nuclear mega reactor we're building! Now all that's left is to AI generate us some text, AI generate some images, AI generate us a website and that's it! YC26 baby!

Did I get that right? This is like investing into a perpetual motion machine on Kickstarter level crazy. Am I still living on the same planet?

What about (extreme) weather? The nice pictures looks like being in open sea, and there big storms may have an expensive impact if not everything is taken into account.

What's the benefit from using an off shore platform against building them on the beach and using pipes for cooling?

Accident waiting to happen... who's gonna insurance these facilities?

Translation: they won't let us build datcenters on land because we screw things up too much there. And we can't afford space. So we'll do it at sea where we can run all the gas turbines we want and wreck the Earth from there.

See panthalassa as an alternative

How do they handle rough seas?

who's ready for gpu piracy?

The question now becomes: Will the AI bubble pop before we get sea datacenters?

YCombinator S26?

Guys, guys, guys... so hear me out - remember last month when we were all giddy about datacenters in space? Well, apparently investors weren't too keen on that idea so we've come up with something much better: Nuclear datacenters at sea!

Now this is truly a visionary proposition that will certainly become another unicorn and have no issues whatsoever.

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