NIMBY stuff is an issue too, I live in AK and would love if we started building them, but there are infrastructure problems and then people who have never worked in the arctic frantically pitching a fit about caribou they’ve never seen.

NIMBY stuff is why we will go to space. In space nobody can tell you “no.”

A problem with the arctic, is that infrastructure becomes a problem the longer north you go. Even in western countries like Norway, the power grid is simply too small to handle any data center in the northern-most counties. Not to mention the political issue, where those living there would face higher utility bills.

It is assumed that if you want to build lots of data centers up north, you also need to invest in infrastructure. I've seen discussion about smaller modular nuclear power plants, but those things take years. Another thing could be other renewable energy sources.

One huge advantage of ocean data centers is that you can do geothermal down there more cheaply and easily, and it's a very consistent source of power, so you don't even need hydro. Additionally, deep ocean water is consistently very near freezing, you could get below freezing out of the water but then you lose conduction efficiency.

The replacability is nice, but even in terrestrial data centers there are situations where something fails and it never gets replaced, just routed around, until the pod gets ripped out and replaced in its entirety.

>I would suggest data centres near the arctic - it's close to most of the Northern hemisphere's users, presents an easy option for cooling (the place is a heat sink), and, with collapsing glaciers, there will be abundant hydro power to be used.

Advocating for exacerbating the melting of the polar ice cap, which will endanger dozens of millions of people, just to have more convenient data centers for manufacturing AI slop, is peak HN.