Who needs data centers in space when they can float offshore?

The power crunch for AI data centers has gotten so severe that people — not just Elon Musk — are talking about launching servers into space so they can access solar power 24/7.

One startup thinks the ocean is a better place for them. Offshore wind developer Aikido is planning to submerge a 100-kilowatt demonstration data center off the coast of Norway this year. The small unit will live in the submerged pods of a floating offshore wind turbine.

If all goes well, the company hopes to build a larger version to deploy off the coast of the UK in 2028. That model will sport a 15 megawatt to 18 megawatt turbine that will feed a 10 megawatt to 12 megawatt data center.

The move offshore could solve a few challenges. Proximity to power is an obvious one, since the source will sit overhead. Winds offshore are more consistent than onshore, and a modest battery could bridge any lulls. 

Submerged data centers could eliminate concerns from NIMBY groups — “not in my backyard” — who oppose data centers near their properties over noise and and pollution concerns. 

Lastly, by floating in cold seawater, cooling the servers would be a simpler proposition. (Cooling is one particularly vexing issue for orbital data centers, since they need to employ different techniques in the vacuum of space.)

But for all the challenges offshore data centers solve, they introduce a few more. The ocean is a harsh environment. While submerged servers wouldn’t be battered by waves, they also wouldn’t be completely stationary, so they’d need to be fully battened down. Seawater is also corrosive, so any equipment, including the container and power and data connections, will need to be hardened against it.

Aikido isn’t the first company to propose sinking data centers in seawater. Microsoft first floated the idea over a decade ago, and in 2018 it launched an experiment off the coast of Scotland, which was modestly successful. Only six of more than 850 servers failed in the 25-month trial. (The data hall was filled with inert nitrogen gas, which might help explain the servers’ low failure rates.) 

Microsoft accrued a number of patents over the years, which it open-sourced in 2021. But by 2024, the company had deep-sixed the project.