Atomarine: nuclear-powered AI data centres at sea
Atomarine is a hot new AI startup that just got funding from Y Combinator! That’s the important part, job number one. All it took was some AI pictures of ships on a Claude-designed website. Venture capitalists are simple creatures. But second is the business plan. Atomarine is going out to sea in…
Atomarine is a hot new AI startup that just got funding from Y Combinator! That’s the important part, job number one. All it took was some AI pictures of ships on a Claude-designed website. Venture capitalists are simple creatures. But second is the business plan. Atomarine is going out to sea in floating AI data centres — powered by nuclear reactors! What could go wrong? [Atomarine] The founders are Emile Germonpré, who’s working on his Ph.D in nuclear engineering, and Dimitris Koutentakis, who has an engineering degree, but brags of his four years at a hedge fund. Atomarine’s plan is to build data centres in standard containers and put them on barges that just float out in the ocean, beyond all that tedious regulation and the angry people with signs. Atomic seasteading. You can float the Atomarine data barge anywhere! [Y Combinator] Small modular reactors for commercial shipping don’t exist. Until then, Atomarine plans to run on natural gas! This is a standard data centre developer move — they say they’re totally developing a clean system, but they’ll just run the DC on dirty power for the time being. That is, for years. The US Navy does have small modular reactors. They work great! But the Navy doesn’t have to worry about cost, and they can use bomb-grade uranium. Because they’re the military. And they can keep the atom bomb fuel secure, because they’re the military. Your barge floating in the ocean run by startup bros might be a little less secure. Atomarine brags it can deploy to anywhere in the world — but you know pirates exist, right? They’re real? Security is not addressed on Atomarine’s website. Also, there’s one or two regulations about nuclear reactors anywhere on Earth. Anyone you’d get reactor fuel from will have a number of concerns that they’ll be quite firm about. There’s other issues, like cooling the AI rigs. Atomarine’s launch site promises “Virtually free cooling from seawater.” It’s not like seawater’s highly corrosive to work with. I’m sure the water-cooled Nvidia rigs will cope with seawater just fine. [Y Combinator] Atomarine is floating all manner of claims. Data centres up and running four to five times as fast as on land! 1.5 gigawatts built out per year! Starting some year. The claimed 20 to 40 year lifespan. I guess that’s the barges, ’cos it sure isn’t the data centres. Data centres in the oceans have been tried. They didn’t work. The cooling was good — but maintenance and operation was a massive pain. Atomarine’s data barges out in the ocean will also need good internet to serve the data. No, Starlink won’t cut it. [IT Pro, 2024] The best you can say about this idea is that it’s not quite as dumb as data centers in space. But you can say anything if it’s forward looking. And if you wrote your nuclear plan with Claude. Move fast and irradiate things. Video — PodcastSource: Pivot to AI — Published — Category: Business