Technology

It would probably take more energy than we can harvest on earth, considering the sunlight and geothermal energy doesn't boil it currently.

I could see it affecting the temperature on local scales, such as the area immediately around the data center.

If it's being powered by wind, it's not adding additional energy to the environment, at all. It all comes down to conservation of energy, and no chemical changes are occurring.

Electrical energy is being generated by harvesting kinetic energy in the wind, that's essentially just moving energy, converting it from one form to another. Energy can be swapped and converted around, but in the end, it almost always ends up turning into heat or light.

That wind, one way or another was going to convert its energy into heat. Most often it does that by convection, causing water vapor in the air to change state, after condensing, the now warmer water release its heat into the ocean when it falls as rain.

Turning a wind turbine to generate electricity, to run computers, is a much more elaborate route to take, but the result is the same. The wind is moving slower, a lower energy state, but the ocean is warmer, a higher energy state. It all evens out.

Edit: I just realized, that sometimes that kinetic energy from wind contributes to storms and sometimes those storms generate lightning, and while most of the energy from lightning does turn into heat, some of that energy generates light, and some of that light shoots out into space (actually escaping the earth). So probably, higher wind speeds do result in cooling the earth a very little bit (not it's likely negligible)

This makes me wonder what is better - underwater DCs heating the oceans, or above water ones with all the pollution creating and water sucking cooling instead. Part of me thinks the underwater one might be better.

Deep sea ~~welder~~ admin.

You can also just use air

If you have access to it. Unfortunately, most of them are setting up in drought ridden deserts. They'll be fighting Nestlé for the last drops pretty quickly.

So there's a non-zero chance we will find out later that it's just a bathysphere full of children doing math.

God, the insane amount of energy it would take to even remotely measure a difference in the ocean water is astronomical. You might be able to cause some small impact in a relatively small radius that could impact wildlife, but I feel like there are open enough areas that not much would be impacted in the area.

I bet they duplicate everything and just switch off faulty units. Every year or so, they would emerge the whole thing and replace what they need at a large scale.

If only the US had a coastline.