Current nuclear-powered ships are run by the world’s premier naval powers and protected by their own stealth or a huge array of armed escort ships.

Have these guys factored in the cost of a task force of protective missile frigates, subs, and destroyers at each site?

YCombinator S26?

Guys, guys, guys... so hear me out - remember last month when we were all giddy about datacenters in space? Well, apparently investors weren't too keen on that idea so we've come up with something much better: Nuclear datacenters at sea!

Now this is truly a visionary proposition that will certainly become another unicorn and have no issues whatsoever.

"Gas today, nuclear tomorrow" in the power section, with a LNG tanker docked to it.

With the current capabilities of drone warfare is literally putting ecological bombs near to the shores. Awesome!

I ran the numbers for this about six months ago and it works out a lot better than all the other alternatives.

The fact you're surrounded by coolant, can use intrinsically safe versions of high pressure reactors and have low latency between multiple markets with one datacenter is a big plus.

That you're not competing with humans for electricity or water is another.

That said you'd want to build a semi submersible platform with the nuclear reactors in the pontoons and the superstructure able to house container based datacenter units. The only place with enough experience to build these is South Korea which isn't a deal breaker per se, but Samsung can pretty much eat your lunch if these get successful.

Avoiding legal jurisdiction, regulation and tax by being offshore.

Bring on the exploding drone boats.

Sealand[1] is becoming attractive real estate again...

[1] https://sealandgov.org/

Sure, lets heat up the oceans even more.

The sensible way would be to use the waste heat for district heating, but let's heat the fish instead

How do they deal with saltwater corrosion, do the barges go in drydocks after a couple of years? What about weather do they have their own propulsion do they need to be towed to avoid bad weather? Can't you put the same gear in containers next to the shore and avoid the whole weather issue?

This reminds me of the Pangeos megayacht from a few years back.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/pangeos-terayacht-turtle/

TL;DR: Pangeos was a concept for a floating free city that trended a few years back, but was never built for obvious reasons, just like how these floating data centres will never be built. Presumably some people were bilked into paying money to the Pangeos scammers, just like there will be those who "invest" in this.

The problem is that it costs a lot more to put a nuclear reactor into a permanently sea-worthy form-factor than it does to build on land and put up with some pesky taxes. There are plenty of places with lax regulations (environmental and otherwise) that will be happy to let you build whatever size data centre you want if you're willing to build the power generation too.

Genuinely, have these guys done anything other than AI generated ship pictures? The top down ones look like they didn’t even use a good model.

I’d be stunned if anyone takes this seriously

Why the website and the images look like AI-generated?

What about (extreme) weather? The nice pictures looks like being in open sea, and there big storms may have an expensive impact if not everything is taken into account.

So Much land. Even non civilized lands, Even near sea for piping water. What does this idea solve? Or just adds problems like, Non secure assets/nucclear on the sea.

What's the benefit from using an off shore platform against building them on the beach and using pipes for cooling?

Accident waiting to happen... who's gonna insurance these facilities?

Translation: they won't let us build datcenters on land because we screw things up too much there. And we can't afford space. So we'll do it at sea where we can run all the gas turbines we want and wreck the Earth from there.

How do they handle rough seas?

who's ready for gpu piracy?

Wasn't there a Microsoft idea to build data centres in shipping containers a few years ago, again using the ocean for cooling?

What happened to that?

Given the expense of the latest AI chips, or just the RAM for them, the price of land, cooling and power is not top of the expenses bill, so all talk of sea-based or space-based data centres has to be regarded as having jumped the shark.

As of yet I have not seen the use of server racks as structural architectural features. They always seem to need a vast shed that has its own supports, when server racks could also be the walls and supports for much of the building, or some other structure, maybe a road bridge.

Write up an ai generated biz plan, shop it around quick. make the necessary human pyramid, get it on the stock market. it'll be as irresistible as peanut butter & chocolate. (ai+nuclear.. with a dollop of cheaper than spacex AI buildout). Doesn't matter than solar+batteries might be a BIT safer. (even goat Elon has said we don't need nuclear as we already have a free one that is at a safe distance)

The question now becomes: Will the AI bubble pop before we get sea datacenters?

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