While Elon Musk has often touted putting datacenters in space, reports suggest that another geographic area may soon become a widespread target: our lakes and oceans. Two underwater datacenters are already in operation off the coast of China, and recent reports suggest that the Trump administration is considering plans for four proposed underwater, sealed-pod datacenters to be built off the shores of Maine and Alaska. At a campaign rally in Ohio last month, Donald Trump said of datacenters: “There’s so much money to be made for Ohio … they’ll go to China … we want them.” Underwater iterations are particularly attractive to tech companies as they largely eliminate community opposition and controversy around datacenters in residential areas on land.
In theory, underwater datacenters could also significantly cut down on utility costs, another issue that’s currently riling communities across the country. A Microsoft project set up off the coast of northern Scotland in 2018 found that after two years, server failures were reduced by 87% compared with on-land datacenter equivalents. Microsoft executives saw the project, which ended after two years, as an unmitigated success.
That makes the cool, salt-free waters of the Great Lakes, home to 30 million people in major cities such as Chicago, Toronto and Detroit, potentially attractive to datacenter companies. A spokesperson for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said: “The supports development of data center infrastructure that is essential to remaining the world leader in Super Intelligence while using its statutory authorities to protect water quality.” But the environmental consequences of any similar project in the freshwater Great Lakes, which those tens of millions of people depend on for drinking water every day, could be significant. Local environmental activists are already worried and sounding the alarm – even though no underwater datacenter projects are currently proposed for the region.
For them, they think it is better to be prepared than surprised, given the high stakes of the ecologically sensitive ecosystem. Lake Erie already has an issue with harmful algal blooms, and they develop because of heat, not only because of fertilizers and agricultural runoff,” said John Lipaj of the Lake Erie Foundation, a non-profit based in Ohio. The floor of Lake Erie on the US side falls under the jurisdiction of the state of Ohio.
In the past, its state government, where Republicans hold a supermajority, proposed a law making it easier for datacenter companies to discharge wastewater into public waterways. That measure was denied by the state’s last July following a public outcry. Of the eight US Great Lakes states, only New York currently has a temporary state-wide moratorium on datacenter construction.
These have not been around a long time,” said Lipaj. These are all things that could lead to a catastrophic failure that we don’t want happening in the Great Lakes.” Lake Erie is home or close to major cities such as Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo and is already by far the warmest of the five Great Lakes during summer months. It also ranks as one of the most polluted large lakes in the country in large part due to agricultural runoff in its western basin.
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