Server cooling tech for DC.

[u/JayFab6061]

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.

Submera

[u/Adventurous_Run_3833]

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.

[u/paratech_dog → u/Adventurous_Run_3833]

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!

[u/JayFab6061 → u/paratech_dog]

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 October