What’s the regulatory path to something like this? Oceans seem to have all the problems of land except manifold: permitting is nigh impossible, and power is hard to line up.

To make it worse, underwater tech is notoriously hard to make operationally visible. Sabotage is trivial and undifferentiable from failure and honest error. When we used to work in trading subsea cable cuts in Asia would constantly ruin our best networks. Everyone had point to point microwave expressly because it wasn’t breakable in this way. Exposing compute to this rather than just networking would have doomed the entire enterprise.

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CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No permits needed in international waters, and PV arrays work fine there.

He should look at renting space on container ships before considering orbital DCs, IMO. But that doesn't satisfy the critical "Rocket company needs something to do" constraint.

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arjie an hour ago | parent [-]

There was one barge DC from Nautilus[0]. The problem was to get the amount of power they needed shore power, and fiber from there. Undersea is absolutely crazy to me. But surface vessels are interesting. I wonder what you do: tie a massive gas tanker to a powership (ocean sees night - space doesn't) and then put a container ship full of chips nearby? International waters aren't that far off, so you could reasonably run a fiber line back to shore for interconnect but to get actual full decoupling, I suppose you'd use Starlink.

Sounds terrific actually haha. Boy would that be a sight to behold.

0: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nautilus-puts-sto...

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CamperBob2 an hour ago | parent [-]

No, you just use solar panels on the container ship. The same ones you'd use on a satellite.

There are thousands of container ships in international waters at any given time, so you wouldn't install a few massive power-hungry data centers on a few ships. You'd put a lot of PV-powered data centers on a lot of ships. Pretend you launched them into space, in other words... but don't actually launch them.

And yes, you'd network them via Starlink, just like the satellites would be.

	▲	arjie an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But ships have night. The PVs would need backup batteries for the entire night-time period to say nothing of the 4x capacity loss. A satellite can just see the sun the whole time and it's getting nice clean sunshine. I think the powership works better. Regardless, every time this guy does something super capital intensive, it looks stupid and then works out for him. So long as it keeps happening, the probability that he is just much smarter than me and predicting the future better dominates the probability that he keeps getting lucky.