Ahoy! Google Mulling Data Centers On High Seas

Google, in its ongoing quest to build the most cost and energy efficient data centers on the planet, is apparently thinking of taking a page from the Principality Of Sealand playbook by setting up shop in the open ocean.

According to a Monday report in The Times (UK), Google has filed a patent that covers the building of sea-based data centers on barges situated approximately seven miles offshore, a move that could save the company untold millions in energy costs and data center property taxes.

The sea-based data centers would derive their power and cooling from wave energy, according to The Times, which viewed the patent application and excerpted the following:

"Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away."

Cooling data centers with seawater is certainly possible, but there are challenges associated with the marine environment that need to be taken into account, said John Niemann, a product line manager at American Power Conversion, West Kingston, R.I.

"Seawater is generally cool year round, and it can be used to reject heat. But it can also definitely be corrosive, and that needs to be a consideration, in terms of the equipment that's used to isolate seawater from the water that's used to reject the heat from the system," Niemann said.

Google is always looking for ways to make its infrastructure more scalable and cost efficient, but doesn't have anything to announce regarding this specific technology, a spokesperson for the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant said in an email to ChannelWeb.

"We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products, services or infrastructure, some don't," said the spokesperson.