Google Applies for "Offshore Data Center" Patent

Google is planning an amazing data center project - the "offshore data center", which will fully utilize marine energy and use the ocean's temperature to cool the equipment. Some related patent projects have also been submitted.

The benefits of this method are obvious. The data center will operate submerged in water. If well arranged, a 40-megawatt data center would not require any real estate or property taxes, and would almost entirely avoid using polluting energy sources.

For power generation, wave energy will form a "wave farm" to generate electricity for Google's data centers. The patent document also describes a seawater heat exchange system that can be used for cooling the data center.