Forum Moderators: goodroi
They are now building datacenters on ships that can be floated 7 miles outside the international zone, for the specific purpose of avoiding taxes.
patent office link [appft1.uspto.gov] (not sure what other links are acceptable)
The ships will use wave generated power (Pelamis units at 5 megawatts) and ocean based cooling.
This is above and beyond the (much) simpler patent granted earlier for cargo container based mini-datacenters.
So, given the security issues of doing this, the urge to avoid taxes must be overwhelming. Thanks for paying your fair share and helping the economy Gooogle!
;-)
If they do go ahead with water based datacenters it does not mean it is intended to avoid taxes. There are many other benefits. I could imagine this as a good system to increase capacity and avoid people complaining about a large datacenter behind their home. Also it seems to have some decent environmental upside. If you want to get crazy it might even be a fast way to improve service for island countries after they have a natural disaster.
Hmm. Limited bandwidth and really trash latency.
Just scanning. Didn't read the article yet.
Much of the world's communications infrastructure also runs through the oceans, so that system 100 could tap into existing infrastructure near shorelines.
That's all there seems to be on how they connect to the internet. It sounds a little insane. They'd have to tie in a junction to existing submarine cables off-shore, meaning they'd always be commited to those spots. They couldn't just float over top of a cable somewhere and shoot down a fibre-optic harpoon. And it's hard to understand how it would be cheaper to maintain the datacentre ship/s rather than just put it on-shore where the cable comes up. The dodging tazes aspect sounds equally impossiblem, but who knows. Funny thing - the date of filing is my birthday. I would expect it to be April 1.
Maybe it's power related - the energy costs went through the roof and then some, this is now probably the #1 cost to data centers, perhaps tide generating power supply close to ships would help cut down costs?
Either way I think it's one of those crazy things that people patent because they've got too much time on their hands.
They are now building datacenters on ships that can be floated 7 miles outside the international zone, for the specific purpose of avoiding taxes.
Plus, it's not the data centers themselves that will be generating revenue- it's Google corporate, which remains firmly entrenched (barring any major earthquakes) on U.S. soil.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 12:06 am (utc) on Sep. 11, 2008]
the taxes will be the same.
They can create offshore companies that would invest (without paying lots of taxes) into those ships, data centers and then lease (tax deductible) them at low price to the main company - there are plenty of extremely highly paid people who devise such schemes that save billions of dollars. Apart from employment costs datacenters are probably #2 cost at companies like Google, so in theory the idea is plausible but in practice would you risk by having such important stuff on ships? I would not.
[blogs.zdnet.com...]
Seems pretty non-evil.
