Ronan Bradley's FinanceTech Directions

I had to read this report by Rob Daly twice, check the posting date wasn’t 1st April and then go check other sources. Apparently, Google is attempting to patent the concept of a datacenter-on-a-boat! The US patent application also includes details on how it will be powered - by wave power of course. (Rob's article goes even further by discussing the opportunity not yet patented by Google for a datacenter in orbit).

I will pass over my own concerns about what I see as the long standing and on-going abuse of the patent concept for this class of business ideas (Imagine if somebody had patented the concept to laptops or worse still, patented putting toilets on airplanes – which is closer in originality to this one!) and focus on the core issues. Yes, I can see why floating data center may have certain advantages in terms of land costs and cooling issues (no property tax and all that cold sea-water close at hand). However, I would wonder whether the extra costs would out-weigh these.

Which suggests to me that the main ‘benefit’ may turn out to be avoidance of data privacy laws. However, even this benefit is not going to work in many parts of the world. For instance, European data privacy laws stop export of personal data to locations not covered by similar laws (and Swiss banking laws famosly go much further). Add to that the rather obvious risk of attack and natural disaster on these datacenter vessels and the further risk that they get used to store data associated with illicit activities which would obviously benefit with extra-territorial locations, makes it all seem rather pie-in-the-sky. I guess I now know what the Google patent team do with their “20% time on your own projects”.

Ronan