Why not ?

Posted by Fahim_444

10 Comments

  1. It would require all the nations of the world to be at peace to be fully functional. Il will never happen. Sadly.

  2. yeahbitch_science_ on

    The nazis and aliens wont allow peasants like human to increase their population at Antarctica 🤣 /s

  3. MarionberryOpen7953 on

    Construction costs, infrastructure, power transmission, data transmission. The internet is linked together by physical cables. If this was economical, they would be doing it. It might become economical in the future though and then it would make sense

  4. Tiny_Dare_5300 on

    My guess? Big oceans, legal access, environmental protection agencies, and polar bears. Mostly polar bears.

  5. Lots of factors, one of them is data compliance, lots of countries require the cloud data center to be in the same country for data residency etc..

  6. Embarrassed_Camp_291 on

    A lot more goes into data centres than just “building it”.

    Once you have built all your components, you have to then get them all to Antarctica. Theres no proper roads, so you might have to find a way of building them so transport can move properly.

    There’s probably some labour laws that require your employees to have *some* protection from the cold (and likely some form of insurance) which would be a massive added cost.

    Data centres are also typically built in places which are able to have easy connection to large power sources (the energy infrastructure). This doesn’t in Antarctica.

    Cooling has to be targeted on components. Yes having a much cooler environment will help, but you might still get hot spots and will need a cooling system. These might be mass produced in a sense (See below) and so you end up paying for the cooling system anyway

    Im not sure how similar this is to data centres, but with modern super computers, they tend to be made up of lots of shipping containers, each with lots of computers nodes in. You then just plug (there’s a little more too it) your shipping containers together. They do this so that, when a component fails, you can just disconnect that container and put in a new or temporary one.
    You cant do that easily in Antarctica.

    I believe Antarctica is some form of protected land where you are only allowed to do research there (e.g. neutrino detector, wildlife) but it has to be minimally invasive. All the logistics and infrastructure are not minimally invasive. You’ll also have to prove (and then conform to) to the rest of the world that your data centre is for international use research (and probably more than just “researching LLMs).

    That’s a few reasons why.

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