That’s fair. I guess when they mentioned they were building a PC I assumed it was relatively recent hardware. But I’ve been there when you can’t get or find drivers, or Windows tells you the old drivers aren’t compatible with newer OS’ and things like that.

I was going to say… If it takes you literally 1.5 days to simply install and after 2 days you can’t even launch Steam? I’m sorry, but you have extraordinarily fucked up. Whatever the fuck is happening there is not on Windows. OP, I would love to understand what you were seeing or what was happening. And I also wonder if you are using an actual Windows OS image, or what you tinkered with or ran scripts on to maybe “clean Windows up”. Unfortunately so many of those scripts are also fucking notorious for breaking some Windows functionality, like the Xbox games and what not.

Don’t get me wrong. Windows is becoming worse and worse in both features and performance (AI powered file recommendations in my start menu? get the fuck outta here). But I’m sorry, this complaint in the OP is not it.

There was this quote they gave when asked about impact to the surrounding ocean.

Natick uses raw sea water for cooling, with the water returned to the ocean a fraction of a degree warmer than ambient. Due to rapid mixing in ocean currents, the temperature impact just a few meters downstream of the datacenter is undetectable. We used cameras on the exterior of the vessel to observe wildlife during deployment. We found that the datacenter provided an attractive location for sea life, and was quickly colonized by multiple species of fish and other sea life.

At a huge scale, that maybe could be an issue if you extrapolate. But as others have pointed out, data centers today already require air and water cooling which isn’t likely as efficient so net gain on the environment is probably worse with land data centers in terms of cooling. And they noted the hardware inside had a higher reliability, potentially due to its pure nitrogen atmosphere in the capsule, so that’s less need for buying replacement servers and performing maintenance.

No clue if this thing is actually feasible beyond small scale due to the very high deploy and retrieval costs. But in my opinion this isn’t like some environmentally oblivious solution.