Is there any reason this isn't more common? Why aren't more US datacenters in the Chicago metro area where the air is dry and cool, and trillions of gallons of frigid water is available? The geography is mild and natural disasters that effect datacenters are basically unheard of.<p>It seems silly that so many datacenters are in central Texas, where not only are tornados and tropical storms fairly common, but it's hot and humid for 7 months out of the year.
Who remembers google's patent from a couple of years ago for floating data centers? Using the sea to cool it was a big part of that idea, alongside tidal power. I'm kinda disappointed to see that this isn't the complete realisation of that stuff, but its still a move in the right direction.<p>Original patent link: <a href="http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080209234%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080209234&RS=DN/20080209234" rel="nofollow">http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...</a><p>I wonder if you could start a tropical reef around the outlets?
This could not happen in Canada due to its geography. Most of our inhabitants are sitting right by the border with the USA yet in the North we could easily cool buildings for free with our weather and water.
The video looks a little bit like the open compute project video from facebook .<p>Isn't pumping so much water through the pipes less efficient compared to facebooks method of cooling air down by spraying the water ?<p>See fb method at <a href="http://livestre.am/wBjp" rel="nofollow">http://livestre.am/wBjp</a>
it also seemed to be a great idea to use outside cool water for "free" cooling of nuclear power plants. Happens to be not such a good idea after many years of that [ab]use. While on the global scale the datacenters itself don't have the impact yet, it will definitely affect the water ecosystem local to the datacenter. There is no free lunch. Though Googlers may be under impression that there is.