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Samsung is targeting 2028 to commercialize its floating data centers

Land shortages and application processes would be avoided

Saltwater challenges need to be ironed out

With terrestrial data centers under increased scrutiny over water and energy consumption, and facing intensifying local opposition, cloud providers are being forced to think more creatively, and Samsung is now dreaming up a floating data center.

Its Samsung Heavy Industries group subdivision now has plans to commercialize floating data centers by as soon as Q2 2028, and even plans to secure orders before installations.

By floating compute on the water, Samsung would be able to overcome land shortages but also reduce cooling requirements by keeping them at a more stable temperature.

Samsung to float data centers on the water by 2028

The company's plans include developing a dedicated barge to house servers, electrical infrastructure and on-board power equipment, however initial deployments would primarily use shore-based electricity, tapping into existing grid infrastructure but benefiting from the cooling properties of water.

Earlier concepts also proposed the idea of using LNG-fuelled solid oxide fuel cells, while renewable sources like solar and wind could also be considered.

Samsung also argues that floating facilities could be delivered more quickly than traditional terrestrial facilities because they can avoid lengthy permitting processes and use existing shipbuilding manufacturing processes and tooling.

However, the concept also has some complexities that need to be addressed, like water ingress and humidity, the corrosive nature of saltwater, and stability in tides and currents.

"Floating data centers represent a major new opportunity for the shipbuilding and offshore industries," Samsung Heavy Industries CEO Sung-an Choi concluded.

(Image credit: MOL) Samsung is not the first technology heavyweight to moot the potential of floating data centers, especially as power demands rise due to AI pressures.

Recent reports detailed how startup Panthalassa, backed by Peter Thiel, is developing floating data centers using wave energy and ocean water cooling systems.

And in May 226, a floating data center project in Japan gained significant backing from Hitachi , which signed a memorandum with shipping firm Mitsui OSK Lines to develop and operate the facility.

Chinese authorities and private engineering company HiCloud Technology also recently announced the launch of a jointly-developed $226 million installation of an underwater data center where sealed server modules operate beneath the ocean using seawater for passive cooling.

This 24-megawatt installation processes artificial intelligence workloads, 5G services, and large-scale data annotation operations requiring substantial computing capacity.

Microsoft also previously tested submerged data center capsules through its Project Natick initiative , conducted near Scotland and California before discontinuing commercial development efforts.

All of this while talks of data centers being sent up into space are playing out, of course, and while it's unclear which may solve the problem long-term, floating data centers certainly look to be more realistic on a shorter timeline.

Via Seoul Economic Daily

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You might want to be sitting down for this. The Asus ProArt PA32KCX clocks in at just under $8,800. Undoubtedly, this 32-inch monitor is a technical tour de force. But $8,800? Really?

The highlights among a long list of impressive specifications that go at least some way to justifying that staggering sticker price are 8K native resolution, an IPS panel with 4,032 dimming zones, 1,200 nits of peak HDR brightness, a motorised colorimeter for automated calibration and utterly comprehensive connectivity.

No question, then, this is one of the most highly specified displays on the market today. By some metrics, for instance, it positively blows away the likes of the Apple Pro Display XDR, which offers a mere 6K resolution and 576 dimming zones.

Speaking of 6K monitors, some models make for a rather uncomfortable comparison with the Asus ProArt PA32KCX. Take Asus's own ProArt PA32QCV . That's a 6K monitor that can be had for literally one eighth the price of this 8K monster. Can the jump from 6K to 8K really be worth that much?

And, more generally, how can this megabucks monitor justify itself against the best business monitors we've tested, all of which are far cheaper? Time to find out.

Asus ProArt PA32KCX: Design and features

Future Future Future Utterly comprehensive connectivity

Automated calibration

Underwhelming build quality

Specs

Panel size: 32-inch

Panel type: IPS

Resolution: 7,680 x 4,320

Brightness: 1,200 nits

Contrast: 1,000:1 (static)

Pixel response: 5ms

Refresh rate: 60Hz

Color coverage: 97% DCI-P3, 95% Adobe RGB

HDR: Display HDR 1000

VESA: 100mm x 100mm

Connectivity: HDMI 2.1 x2, DisplayPort 2.1 x1, Thunderbolt 4 x2 with 96W PD, USB hub with USB-C x1 and USB-A x3

When you're charging the thick end of $10,000 for a PC monitor, that does rather raise expectations. And the Asus ProArt PA32KCX doesn't meet them in every regard.

The main problem is distinctly underwhelming build quality. Compared to any given mainstream monitor, the plastic chassis is perfectly functional. But at this price point, it feels thoroughly low rent.

The I/O panel on the rear looks particularly cheap for such an expensive display and the usual plastic creaks and groans as you adjust the height, tilt or swivel of the display really stand out. Again, all of this is normal for, say, a $500 monitor, or even a $1,000 panel. But at $8,800, you might expect better.

No question, the Asus ProArt PA32KCX isn't even in the same galactic super cluster for build and engineering as Apple's Pro Display XDR and its lush all-alloy materials. That said, in terms of features, the ProArt has any Apple display comprehensively beaten.

Connectivity is a particular strong point with HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C, Thunderbolt and more all included. There's also a KVM switch, display daisy chaining support and a USB hub. So, pretty much every eventuality is covered.

The motorised colorimeter is pretty nifty, too. It swings out from the bottom left of the display, allowing the ProArt PA32KCX to self-calibrate any among the long list of colour spaces it supports. What's more, that calibration can be scheduled to take place automatically at regular intervals.

You also get proper Mac support including brightness controls directly in MacOS when enabling HDR. In short, this is a very highly specced monitor, it's just not a beautifully engineered monitor.

Asus ProArt PA32KCX: Performance

Future Future Future Future Incredible pixel density

Local dimming is hit and miss

Noticeable fan noise

For a lot of applications, 8K native resolution is overkill. Just to clarify, that's 7,680 by 4,320, over 33 million pixels or four full 4K grids crammed into this 32-inch display. The pixel density works out to a staggering 275 DPI. That's smartphone territory and double the density of a 32-inch 4K monitor.

In many ways, the most apt comparison is with 6K 32-inch displays, which come in a little over 200 DPI. In terms of aspects like text rendering, the benefit of 8K over 6K in daily use is marginal.

Likewise, you're not really getting any extra usable screen space. You'll likely use similar scaling settings whether you go for 6K or 8K. And, you can get 6K monitors for as little as around $1,000. So, where does the benefit of 8K come in?

That'll be professional video and image editing. Broadly, there are two upsides. For video, the 8K resolution allows you to view and edit content in full 4K while leaving oodles of space for toolbars, timelines and the rest. 4K video pixel-for-pixel at full resolution occupies just a quarter of the screen. Remarkable.

As for image editing, well, high resolution images look absolutely stupendous on this monitor. The detail really is breathtaking. There's a practical benefit, too, in the sense of more easily assessing image detail, less need for zooming in and so on. Frankly, once you've edited images on this thing, a 4K monitor feels a bit clunky.

The other really significant feature is the local dimming. This is an LCD panel with full-array backlighting rather than an OLED panel. Asus has configured it with 4,032 zones, which is very high by the standards of this type of mini-LED backlight. But it still isn't anything like per-pixel lighting.

The results are fairly mixed. I've certainly seen worse local dimming implementations. But you can still detect plenty of evidence of the backlight at work. There are lots of tell tale signs, even flaws, like the mouse pointer going dim over dark backgrounds, visible brightness gradients across the screen. In the right circumstances you can even see lighting zones popping on and off.

All of this is somewhat inevitable with mini-LED backlight tech. But it has to be said that Apple's backlight algorithms are definitely better. It's very notable when, for instance, you have a MacBook Pro with similar backlight technology next to this display, just how much more consistent and refined its backlight algorithm is.

Admittedly, the backlight mostly works really well for HDR video. This panel has some serious pop and with over 4,000 dimming zones and up to 1,200 nits of peak brightness, much of the time there's enough precision to do real justice to HDR content.

But, day-to-day, the shortcomings are obvious enough that you may actually want to turn local dimming off, at which point you are looking at an awfully expensive IPS panel with very limited contrast compared to an OLED panel.

Of course, it's a really lovely IPS monitor, with full 10-bit-per-channel and all that good stuff. But, wow, is it pricey. And, of course, it only runs at 60 Hz, which is another example of the ways in which you have to compromise to have that 8K resolution. As is the, on occasion, very noticeable and quite distracting noise from the cooling fans.

Asus ProArt PA32KCX: Final verdict

Future Future Future The Asus ProArt PA32KCX has some pretty obvious shortcomings. The build quality is ordinary and its local dimming algorithm could do with some work. For $8,800, those issues are pretty hard to stomach. Indeed, by several metrics including lighting control, speed, viewing angles and more, the latest 4K 32-inch OLED monitors comprehensively wallop this IPS monitor and its mini-LED backlight.

But here's the thing. If you want 8K, you simply can't have that with OLED technology. Indeed, there are very few options, period. And there are undoubtedly benefits to 8K in a content creation context. Once you've seen high resolution images on this panel, going back to 4K really does feel like a major step backwards.

So, the value proposition offered by the Asus ProArt PA32KCX won't make sense for most users, even most creative professionals. That's especially true when even the likes of Asus itself, not known for its sharp pricing, will do you a similarly sized 6K monitor for about an eighth the price.

Admittedly, this monitor is incredibly well specified when it comes to connectivity. Some creative professionals will also really appreciate features like automated self calibration. And if you have the kind of very particular workflows that will benefit from 8K specifically, well, you may just be able to make the numbers add up. But for everyone else, a 6K monitor for way less money such as Asus's own ProArt PA32QCV model almost certainly makes more sense.

Future Future Future Future For more ultra-high-resolution displays, we've reviewed the best 5K and 8K monitors .

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For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system — by creating a “mini-universe.” This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research , Giovanni Barontini , an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build his mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like the universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half — what he called the "dark sector" — to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. "When you put everything together, things really start to make sense," Barontini told Live Science. "How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping — this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion , but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.

A universe with nothing outside

Barontini set out to look at a problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation — a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So where does our experience of time come from?

One influential idea, called relational time, says that time doesn't exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality. Instead, it emerges from relationships inside the universe, with one part of the system acting as a clock for another. But this idea had never been tested directly in the lab.

Barontini's inspiration came from watching his son play with building toys. "I thought that it's something very similar to what we do in our labs," he told Live Science. "We play with very expensive toys. We create our own small samples of reality."

In his lab, that sample is a Bose-Einstein condensate — a state of matter that forms only at near absolute zero. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, thousands of atoms slow to a near standstill and blur together into a single quantum object, behaving as one.

The University of Birmingham experiment to trap and cool rubidium atoms close to absolute zero — the first step in assembling the mini-universe. (Image credit: University of Birmingham) The dark side of time

To mimic a universe with nothing outside it, Barontini placed the condensate in a trap and divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light. He watched one half, the "bright sector," closely and deliberately ignored the other half, which he called the "dark sector."

The atoms in the bright sector sloshed back and forth in the trap, periodically spilling over the barrier and back again. Barontini called the moments when atoms flooded into the bright sector the "Big Bang" and the times when they drained out the "Big Crunch" (the nickname for one theory of how the universe will end , with the universe collapsing in on itself). Then, he tracked how entropy — a measure of disorder, or how spread out energy is within a system — was exchanged between the two halves as atoms crossed the barrier.

Instead of using laboratory time to order events, he built an "entropic time" — a clock defined entirely by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. If entropy was flowing, time was ticking. If no entropy was exchanged, time stopped. "The entropy exchange between the two systems could be transformed into an internal time variable," Barontini said.

Time speeds up, slows down and stops

What surprised Barontini most was how cleanly everything fit together. The internal, entropic time reliably ordered events in the bright sector. It matched the sequence seen in laboratory time, but it flowed at a different rate.

When entropy was flooding between the sectors, entropic time ran fast. When the exchange slowed, so did the clock. And when the two halves reached equilibrium (no more entropy flowing), the internal clock stopped altogether.

Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance.

Giovanni Barontini, experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham

"Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing," Barontini said.

He then went a step further: Using this internal time, he derived a version of the Schrödinger equation and showed it accurately reproduced what he saw in the experiment. "This was quite surprising, how well everything came together," he said — "very neatly, in a way, which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

Both time itself and the arrow of time — why time flows in one direction rather than the other — may arise from the same source: an observer giving up information. When Barontini chose not to look at the dark sector, he gave up knowledge of that half of the system. That act of ignorance, encoded in entropy, is what gave rise to time in the other half.

"Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance," Barontini said. "To have time and to observe, you have to give up some degrees of freedom."

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Barontini sees this as just the beginning. The same cold-atom tool kit that generated a miniature Big Bang and Big Crunch in his trap could, in principle, be engineered to simulate far more exotic phenomena, such as black hole analogues, the conditions of the early universe, and what will happen at the moment of the Big Crunch itself.

"These are things we can do very simply, using the tools we already have to engineer our systems," he said.

The study is a proof of concept ‪—‬ a first demonstration that controlled quantum systems can serve as a test bed for some unanswered questions in physics . For now, those questions remain open.