China begins building underwater data center with performance equal to 6 million PCs — aims to save 122 million KWh of electricity and nearly ten soccer fields of land | Data centers find refuge at…::China Central Television reports that China has added another data module to the country’s commercial underwater data center (UDC) off Hainan Island.
From one Datacenter? Yes. If you put all datacenters into the sea? Definitely not. And if the Bitcoin scumbags decide that this is a good idea and built huge mining farms underwarer it’s even worse. Datacenters are one of the biggest contributors to energy need already, taking up 1-1.3% of global energy demand. That’s no joke
Going off google the energy required to heat the oceans by 1 degree is approximately 5.4*10^21 kj, or 1389 trillion GWh, or the energy output of over 170 million nuclear power plants over an entire year. Safe to say putting all the server farms in the world in there still isn’t going to make a dent.
It might affect local temperature by a relevant amount if there’s too many in one spot perhaps, and that could be pretty bad. But generally, saving energy is a good thing.
The temperature of the ocean may not change but the heat is dissipated into the atmosphere, making extreme weather events more likely.