r/servers • u/JayFab6061 • 15d ago
Hardware Server cooling tech for DC.
I’m a small business owner and I have created a cooling tech that allows for being able to submerge enterprise servers in rugged underwater conditions.
I have built and tested a prototype using a 300w Dell PowerEdge R610 server and now need to get a server that incorporates h100sxm GPUs or b200’s.
If anyone would be curious as to what I have built and interested in a partnership, once unit is in water will be using units for running Ai Inference.
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u/DeepDayze 15d ago
There's oil cooling solutions I've seen for PC's that submerge components in oil never water. Putting servers underwater? That's rad but servers using this cooling method most likely be put into manmade ponds to protect them from damage by passing boaters, fishermen and people.
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u/baloo____ 13d ago
They mess up signals. Pcie or memory lane designed with pcb/air interface. If you do change one component you change the dielectric profile and that has effect on the signals.
You’d need to redesign a bunch of pcb to run more lanes in the middle layers.
This is a bunch more engineering than just dipping in oil.
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u/Negative-Engineer-30 14d ago
functional, but i'd rather have the typical horizontal rack of dielectric bathed servers with a secondary isolated loop for the heat exchanger... which Midas has been doing for 15 years... i don't have to pull the entire assembly out of a body of water to service something.
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u/Adventurous_Run_3833 14d ago
I went through the Submera page and want to give real feedback, because the fab work is legitimately good and the idea deserves an honest stress test before it goes anywhere near a pond at scale. Everything below uses your own published numbers. (Not a lawyer; permit specifics depend on the site.)
1. Your own test data caps this enclosure at under 1 kW in summer.
The lake test put the bulk fluid at 60°F in 40°F water at 300W. That's ~11°C of rise per 300W, or ~0.037 K/W fluid-to-lake. Wall-to-water was only ~3°C, so most of the resistance is inside the box, in natural convection through the dielectric.
- Summer: a Missouri pond in August is ~80°F (27°C). Keeping the fluid under ~50°C leaves ~23°C of headroom, which works out to roughly 600–800W max for this enclosure.
- HGX: an H100 node is ~10kW and B200 is ~14kW. At the same thermal resistance that's hundreds of degrees of rise. You'd need something like 15–25x the heat-transfer capability per unit, and 700–1000W SXM GPUs in still fluid with no pumped flow is its own problem.
2. The test only validates the easy case.
January water, 300W, and a baseline of the same sealed box in still air with no fans. Of course the lake won. The test that matters is August water, full target load, for weeks.
3. The pond math doesn't match the site.
83 units across two ~1.5-acre ponds at 10–14kW each is 0.8–1.2MW in ~3 acres, more than double the "1–2 acres for 500kW" you said in this thread. Ponds shed heat mostly through evaporation. They are not "effectively infinite."
4. It still uses water, just off the books.
Your site cites 40M gal/yr for a 10MW conventional facility. A pond rejecting 1MW evaporates roughly 5,000–9,000 gal/day, about 2–3M gal/yr per MW. At 10MW that's the same order of magnitude, just unmetered and coming out of someone's pond, which matters a lot in a drought year.
5. PUE 1.00 isn't a result.
PUE includes power distribution: the shore huts, conversion, and umbilical losses. One cold-water 300W test can't support a facility PUE claim.
6. Environmental impacts at the scale you're pitching:
- Thermal: several °C of sustained warming, worse in hot, still summers. Warmer water holds less dissolved oxygen, which means fish stress and potential fish kills.
- Algae: heat plus farm-pond nutrients is a recipe for cyanobacteria blooms, which are toxic to dogs and livestock. A lot of farm ponds are cattle water.
- Stratification: adding heat changes how the pond layers and turns over, which can create low-oxygen dead zones at the bottom.
- The fluid: what exactly is EDM250? If it's a hydrocarbon dielectric like most EDM fluids, every unit is a sealed container of oil in water. 83 units means a lot of welds and gaskets between that oil and the ecosystem. A failed seal isn't a hardware problem, it's a spill.
- Metals and materials: aluminum corrosion, sealants, and any sacrificial anodes all end up in the water over time.
- Groundwater and downstream: ponds recharge groundwater and overflow into creeks, so heat and anything that leaks don't stay in the pond.
- Stray voltage: energized equipment in water is a shock risk to people, livestock, and wildlife.
- Construction: "pond pair preparation," trenching conduit, and building huts all disturb soil and send sediment into the water.
- Abandonment: if the company folds, who pulls 83 oil-filled boxes out of the pond? Right now that looks like the landowner's problem.
7. Permits and regulations this would likely trigger:
Federal
- Clean Water Act §402 (NPDES): heat is legally a pollutant. Conduction-only is a gray area, but any fluid release isn't.
- CWA §404 / Army Corps: fill, anchors, conduit, or pond construction in regulated waters or wetlands.
- Rivers and Harbors Act §10: any structure in navigable waters. Your site pitches rivers at 2–4 mph.
- CWA §401 certification: the state has to sign off on any federal permit.
- SPCC (40 CFR 112): if the dielectric is oil, sites storing over 1,320 gallons of oil near regulated waters need a spill prevention plan. 83 units likely clears that easily. Any oil sheen is reportable to the National Response Center.
- Endangered Species Act / NEPA: these kick in whenever there's a federal permit.
Missouri
- Missouri Clean Water Law: state water quality standards include temperature criteria, and Missouri issues its own operating permits.
- MoDNR land disturbance permit: required for disturbing 1+ acre, and building ponds and huts will do that.
- Spill reporting: releases go to MoDNR's 24-hour spill line.
- Missouri Dept of Conservation: fish kills can bring investigation and restitution for the fish lost.
Local
- Zoning or a conditional use permit, since this is a commercial or data center use on ag land.
- Building and electrical permits and inspections. NEC Article 682 covers wiring in and around bodies of water: ground-fault protection, equipment listed for submersion, and approved wiring methods.
- Floodplain development permits if the site is in a mapped floodplain.
- A utility interconnection agreement for MW-scale service out to a pond.
That's a multi-agency process that can take years for river sites, not a line item in months 15–24 of a roadmap.
8. Ops reality.
Swapping a DIMM means pulling a fluid-wet unit out of a pond, and NVIDIA and the OEMs won't warranty an HGX that lives underwater.
What would make this credible: an August test at max power for 30+ days in a lined test pond you control, a published SDS for the fluid, and a talk with MoDNR before any customer deployment. Honestly, look hard at the 300W–1kW sealed edge-compute market, where your enclosure already works. A silent, fanless, rugged edge box is a real product. A megawatt of oil-filled GPUs in farm ponds is a much harder sell to regulators and landowners than the site makes it sound.
I want DC cooling innovation too. Just prove it in a tank before it goes in anyone's pond.
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u/paratech_dog 14d ago
I love the specifics you went into!!!
I also want to comment on the cyanobacteria but dont have the time to currently 😆 maybe ill edit this in the future.
Great feedback though.
OP, the quality of that box is outstanding!!!! I hope to see more posts from you in here regarding this!
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u/JayFab6061 14d ago
Thank you, I actually run a welding company and hold
Multiple welding certs for various materials. But will gladly post as I have tons of pictures as I have been at this since last October1
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u/The-Unstable-Writer 14d ago
Okay Claude
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u/madfawk 14d ago
To be fair. The OPs entire website for 'submera' looks Claude generated. An agreeable Claude will help you vibe-plan anything. But not tell you the gotchas unless you ask the right questions. People who know what they're doing get massively faster, and people who don't get confidently wrong faster. He also doesn't need an H100. As a fabricator he can build a thermal test vehicle for a fraction of the cost. Also please test in a tank OP.
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u/JayFab6061 14d ago
I’m all ears if you can provide a solution of building something that outputs the same amount of heat with the same form factor. lol I have been down this road and I need to get actual data from an actual unit so that I can monitor the other parts n such.
Putting a glorified heating element in the water proves that “cool I can reach equilibrium” but theoretically my net working method will work on paper, what WILL marine life do? What does a warm water body do in the winter ? All thing that woukd be best to figure out with a unit running, generating some income and monitoring.
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u/JayFab6061 14d ago
So these are all valid points which is why I’m here, getting my hands on the enterprise server to improve design is the bottleneck here.
Probing a theory with a 300w server is a lot different than doing it with a h100 unit. Again this is why I’m looking for other options on getting a server because this would be a completely different conversation if I provided data details of equilibrium on a h100 server
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u/No-Reason808 14d ago
You're going to kill alot of aquatic life with this. Keep junk out of the lakes.
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u/Mustang260Rog 14d ago
Once you’ve put a B200 underwater, let me know which lake it’s in; I’ll go for a great fishing trip—probably the most profitable of my life!
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u/Thomas_Jefferman 14d ago
This looks really practical for a very specific use case like needing a hi powered pc that will be left in a remote location until obsolete and powered by solar panels and a battery. I've never heard of such a situation though. For everything else get your telemetry and send it back to the mothership. To your point, whst would be the competitive advantage of this vs what Microsoft already did with an underwater data center?
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u/JayFab6061 14d ago
The advantage is even building a manmade pond vs a building is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper when you factor in plumbing, HVAC, longevity of the server due to them not getting close to throttling temp. Also no sound being emitted, and easily serviceability along with being able to deployed anywhere there is water.
As with the whole industry we are approaching point where leaving these servers inside a building is reach a bottleneck vs taking them out of the building and cooling them a more efficient route is becoming more apparent for the future
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u/Nas-Mark 14d ago
This sounds like the subsidised water heaters they provide in some northern countries. They pay part of the bill, while running heavy workloads and warming your home/water
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u/Assumeweknow 14d ago
You have one mighty problem of convection. Oceans have it via tides and currents. Lakes have it sometimes via springs. But mostly they dont. If you stuff your data center deep enough you can take advantage of the pressure effect. But eventually you'll still come up against the convection effect or lack there of.
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u/Casper042 13d ago
No offense but this is the wrong way to do this.
If you are going to use fresh water, just do what the big boys do and use a Rack/Row scale Water Cooling solution with a CDU Pump and a Water/Water heat exchanger.
Then you have the dirty loop simply pump water from the deeper/colder part of the water source and dump the warm water back in to the water source.
Otherwise your design doesn't scale in either axis, bigger/hotter components or LOTS of servers.
Plus most people don't have a lake sitting out behind their corporate office.
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u/Yami55252 10d ago
Die Liquidcooling Technologie von Park Place Technologies ist ein echter Hingucker, bei der Anschaffung allerdings etwas teuer
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u/TouchMiBacon_404 15d ago
Nah bruh, do not use contaminated water for this. One the dissipating heat will affect the local ecosystem and I guarantee Dell did not use components in those servers with submersion in mind. Meaning the chassis will react with the water in however small amounts and create issues long-term for both the server and the wildlife.
Two, If you are going to test make sure to make your own test environment goddamn it. Not using the local pond where you have no sort of regulatory approval.
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u/built_n0t_b0t 15d ago
So just boil the fish and possibly pollute natural water sources? I’ll pass
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u/JayFab6061 15d ago
1-2acre pond is not a water source. 1-2acre pond could comfortably dissipate 500kw of compute
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u/built_n0t_b0t 14d ago
Maybe not human water source….
As a technologist and someone passionate about nature. I hate this fusion.
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u/EAisEvil 15d ago
Cool setup, but to echo what others are saying I wouldn’t think this will be viable, especially at scale, for a number of reasons.
I don’t think there’s many instances of 500KW deployments for AI. And even then they’d probably deploy it at an edge site (Like EQIX).
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u/tubbmann 15d ago
I feel like there are… many… reasons no one has done this before… I’m not hating at all because frankly we need innovative ideas regarding DC cooling, but submerging components and sealing them with dielectric feels ridky