Proton data centers all over the world under driveways and sidewalks and parking lots?
One thing I've noticed is that loading can be a bit slow and you probably need processing power in various locations. I was wishing for something to melt the snow on my driveway this morning, and thought of waste heat from data centers. So! How about I give you a free lease on the land under my driveway, you tap into my power and water infrastructure, you stuff a lil data center under the driveway and it melts my snow in winter?
If you did a bunch you could do distributed data centers all over the frozen north.
Could also offer contracts to towns up in areas without sidewalks and install data center sidewalks. Towns would throw you a party if they could get some of the infrastructure costs off their shoulders, you would get a TON of land and you could pick the locations that already had access to power and water.
Heck, you could experiment with those power generating sidewalks in some places.
Trotter
shared this idea
-
Trotter
commented
Distributed Data Center Infrastructure could be a huge risk mitigator for outages, but comes with challenges. Things to solve:
1) can you just recirculate water to do cooling or do you need to tap into the home water supply?
2) split for costs of power and water used? Would you directly pay for power or would you reimburse the homeowner for costs?
3) Access for outages - there's probably all sorts of challenges when you're talking about accessing your property on a leased bit of land, including "Digging this up will mean the homeowner loses access for a day or so". You would want to have a speedy install and removal process ready to go before deployment. Similarly, if something went wrong, a fast replacement so you can troubleshoot elsewhere might be better than on site troubleshooting.Access control to the data centers - what if someone got physical access? Well, one, it's buried under a driveway, sidewalk, or parking lot. That would make it tough to get into - you're talking about digging through someone's infrastructure to access the sealed, containerized data center. Slap a couple tamper evident alarms on the container and hook them into the telecom you're using for data, and you're probably fine. Someone tries to access without your explicit approval, just run a remote wipe on it. No data would be lost because you're doing distributed data storage.
Pretty much everything could be handled similarly - power outage in one place? No worries, the data's also located in three or four other places, you send a notification "we will be a bit slow due to power outages in x locations" to users and reroute.
I could perhaps be persuaded to worry about power outage + tampering happening when comms are offline, if I were paranoid. Maybe power outages trigger a remote wipe automatically and restoral requires a tamper check to be met before the unit will process data again. A lot of the power outage woes could be mitigated by restricting these to homes with a backup generator on them.This limits who could get your driveway data center, but there's still a LOT of homes which would qualify - enough in the northeast US to stand up thousands of mini dc's in every small town surrounding the major cities.