In international waters, it matters more which flag your ship is sailing under than which port is closest.

It has to connect to the U.S. somehow. So they can still subpeona data moving through the switch.

There's going to be a cable connecting this to the mainland, which one could argue means the ship is moored to the U.S. coastline?

Might be a fun legal battle.

> So they can still subpeona data moving through the switch

Well if they weren't an american corporation they would be doing this anyway. Besides, perhaps the most important data wouldn't ever have to be transmitted into the country.

On international waters you follow the laws of the country where the ship is registered.

So, most likely Liberian or Panamanian law...

From the pictures, it looks like the ship is registered in the US (though that could change once it is finished).

It's the other way around: The whole block is the subponea treatment unit of Google. It's offshore so it's not under US jurisdiction.

Don't know how this'd work in actual international waters, but no, this is in a bay, nothing international about it.

Its being built at an island in SF Bay. That doesn't mean its going to be operated there.

Would servers be affected by the instability of the ocean? That is, if they use spinning drives, would the heave and ho of the ocean affect it? Would that affect other electronics and components?

I doubt the heave and ho of the ocean would affect spinning disks like hard drives. We used to put hard drives in iPods that got thrown around by people jogging with few failures.

What is a concern is salt water, wind blowing the surface of of the ocean can add salt into the air that will eventually get into the containers. Salt moisture will be a huge long term problem.

The salt issue is something that's probably already been solved (couldn't find any information on it though). There are underwater science labs, medical rooms at sea, and probably tons of research into how to keep salt out of computers from the US Navy.

For a boat that big you're never going to get accelerations higher than a half G or so, and water is squishy so the jerk is going to be very moderate. I expect that frequent acceleration will actually have some impact on how fast the hard drives wear out, but not a large one.

Protecting everything from salt spray is going to be the bigger concern.

This would be far from the first time electronics were put on a boat.

If you are doing business in the US you will play their rules.