CBS Sunday Morning, April 19, 2026 had a story on a company named Panthalassa, who take a large steel tube and basically make it into an ocean wave generator which can bounce around untethered, communicating via satellite, with a data center inside. Then there is Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) who thinks an orbiting data center can be cooled by the low temperature in space, but nobody has explained where the heat can go if there is only vacuum surrounding it. On 4/23/26 7:24 PM, Mike Hammett via NANOG wrote:
Nor suitable for 24/7 loads.
The past year has seen a lot of attention paid to small and large nuclear. We'll probably see a lot more of it.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions
Midwest Internet Exchange
The Brothers WISP
----- Original Message ----- From: "sronan--- via NANOG" <nanog@lists.nanog.org> To: "Suresh Ramasubramanian" <ops.lists@gmail.com>
Neither solar or wind is particularly cost effective, even at scale.
Shane
On Apr 23, 2026, at 10:00 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com> wrote:
And now thanks to the Iran war, I suspect they’ll all hurriedly transition to wind or solar or anything other than natural gas.
From: Shane Ronan via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org>
We've long surpassed the power available from the commercial power grid. MANY large scale data centers are using cogeneration with natural gas turbines. I don't however think they would be approved for that in the middle of downtown Chicago.
shane
On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 6:54 PM Matthew Petach via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 3:36 PM Christopher Morrow via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 23, 2026 at 5:32 PM Mike Hammett via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
but Cermak is a big building. They can't use up *THAT* much of it. Also, diversifying to tier 2 markets would probably help a lot not have so many eggs in one basket.
how much power, exactly, is landing in Cermak? do you think you could use all of that up with your set of 120kw NVidia racks?
What, nobody is putting shipping-container-sized micro nuclear reactors on the rooftops of the buildings to augment power capacity?
Come on, people, start thinking outside the box a little. ;)
Matt
(yes, yes, permitting, upgrading electrical wiring to handle 10MW coming in from a shipping container on the roof, not as trivial as it sounds...but still, I think we're coming up on the tail end of counting entirely on the power grid to deliver power to high-density compute facilities) _______________________________________________