Genuine question: would people be less angry or the same about data centers if all the water used to cool them was taken from the ocean and desalinated?
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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China is putting data centers in the ocean to cool them and powering them with wind.
It's an interesting idea, if nothing else. Not sure if it'll be good for local marine life to have data centers warming the ocean, though.
How about the power they use, driving up prices for the rest of us? How about the destruction of the computer components market so that regular folks can't buy an affordable computer that doesn't suck? How about the jobs they destroy while replacing humans with computers that do inferior work? You're missing so much about why they're hated. They do like 10 kinds of major societal and environmental damage while only meaningfully contributing in specific contexts. Would it be better if they didn't waste insane quantities of water? Yeah, but they'd still be terrible.
I offer instead:
One glassy gassy boi!
Hmm..idk anything abt this but maybe the salt!
Sugar keeps diesel engines from working and keep concrete from setting
The guy selling his shit to companies to build the data center is the big money winner. Those things have huge amounts of copper.
The companies building the data centers are likely owned by people with a large stake in the AI company they are building for
You're most likely correct. I just cannot get over the rumours I heard about the gigantically huge amounts of copper they have in those data centers. Copper for the ages.
A year or 2 ago, some assholes were shooting substation in the hopes of causing major damage. Im sure data centers got a smaller version of this
Those 5 green blocks are radiators. One of those assholes shot and damage a few of the radiators at a critical substation. It caused power loss to about 7k people including schools and a hospital. The news story said they had to truck in temp substations until they got the new parts to repair. ETA was 6 months to a year.
Sorry, kinda went on a tangent. Good luck with your AI recipe that uses 5 gallons of salt or whatever.
I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about a Ukranian tactic of drone plus thermite bucket.
You can get fine aluminum and iron oxide powder online easily. A sparkler sets it off or even a superheated wire.
The Ukrainians have been having great success at using thermite to forcibly evict Russians from their trenches, and sometimes, from their mortal coils as well.
Probably a bad idea to buy it online.
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Funny those guys seem to have returned to their hedge now that Trump is back in power.
They are to busy with their new ICE jobs to entertain such notions any longer.
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Im confused, what will salt do. My brain basically autocorrected it to suger cause you can put it in concrete and it will ruin it but what does salt do?
I think the idea is to put salt in their cooling water intake and hope it corrodes something important?
Ah okay but at that point you could do something more destructive. Strange meme
During WW2, guards in the New York City subway system had a standing order to shoot on site anyone who came down a certain elevator holding a bucket of sand.
The subway is powered by DC rather than AC electricity. Today solid-state converters are used. But back then, the only option was direct mechanical conversion. Literally a giant AC motor connected to a DC generator. An AC motor was powered by the grid, and its drive shaft was joined to the shaft of a DC generator, which energized the lines of the subway.
But it represented a single point of failure. This one crucial machine was powering the whole subway system. And all it would take is one person throwing a single bucket of sand into the contraption to cause the whole NYC subway system to grind to a halt. Oh, and NYC was the primary port city for American troops and supplies going back and forth to Europe.
Neat
I don’t think it’d even work. I wouldn’t be surprised if their cooling water is distilled in the process, so the salt would just get filtered out.
On boats we literally use sea water to cool things and distill it on the ship. Data centers can surely do the same thing
I feel like boats are probably better equipped to deal with sea water than data centers but I might be wrong
I mean they could be, but there’s nothing stopping the ultra rich from spending less than one dinners’ worth of money on a salt water distillation system for the money printer
sure, but the corporations involved are hardly the most competent nor forward thinking actors :p
money can buy you expertise, ofc, but often these people have an overinflated sense of their own abilities and think their expertise with computers extends into many other fields that it does not extend to :p
I mean let’s be real, you have to use distilled water anyways if you’re using it to cool electronics. The odds that they are buying distilled water instead of distilling it themselves are incredibly fucking low given the fact that a water distillation system costs less than a server rack and buying distilled water is fucking expensive
they do not, they use evaporative cooling towers. i don't think adding salt would make any difference to that either way though
You underestimate how much billionaires cut costs. Water distillation? That could be 1 more gpu.
There are some exploding rockets that can show you examples.
Not a bad point
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I think OP has a $20 bucket of salt and is farming ideas for how to use it to destroy his local datacenter.
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My views of eco terrorism are mostly from reading Zodiac : an ecothriller. The protagonist uses quick acting cement to plug polluting sewage pipes and back up the toxic waste into the polluting facilities.
This could be done in the opposite direction as well. Plug the incoming water pipe to starve the beast pulling hundreds of thousand of liters of water.
Holy shit do NOT DO THIS.
You're assuming the failure point is going to be inside of the facility but it's WAY more likely to be an underground pipe that will speed that that sewage directly into the earth.
This is way worse because it might not be obvious that it's happening for a looong time.
Seriously, find some other way to ecoterrorize. This one is not worth it.
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I'm confuse
Yeah ... I'm really not sure how you're supposed to destroy a data center with a single bucket of salt.
But I'm willing to learn.
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Salt bad for water cooling components? Idk
They have filtration
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$20 bucket of salt? That's way too much for salt. Who's your salt guy?
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The trick is replacing the salt in the bucket with plastic explosive.
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I imagine pouring salt in the water tanks for their cooling systems. It'll make a giant expensive mess and potentially could shut down the datacenter for a while for repairs
This is just like the Romans.
Salting the earth so that data centers cannot grow.
Good thinking.
Are datacenters like slugs or buckets of salt in any way like computers or what am I missing here
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