The power crisis for AI data centers has become so severe that people — not just Elon Musk — are talking about launching servers into space so they can access solar power 24/7.
A startup thinks the ocean is a better place for them. Offshore wind manufacturer Aikido plans to sink 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 UK coast in 2028. This model will feature a 15 megawatt to 18 megawatt turbine that will power a 10 megawatt to 12 megawatt data center.
Moving offshore could solve some challenges. The proximity to the power is obvious, as the source will be on top. Onshore winds are more consistent than on land, and a modest battery could bridge any calm.
Submerged data centers could eliminate the concerns of NIMBY – “not in my backyard” groups – who oppose data centers near their properties due to noise and pollution concerns.
Finally, floating in cold seawater, cooling the servers would be a simpler proposition. (Cooling is a particularly vexing issue for orbital data centers, as they must use different techniques in the vacuum of space.)
However, for all the challenges that offshore data centers solve, they introduce a few more. The ocean is a harsh environment. While submerged servers wouldn’t be hit by the waves, they also wouldn’t be completely immobile, so they would have to be completely cut off. Seawater is also corrosive, so any equipment, including the container and power and data connections, should be hardened against it.
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Aikido is not the first company to propose submerging data centers in seawater. Microsoft first floated the idea a decade ago, and in 2018 it launched an experiment off the coast of Scotland, which met with moderate success. Only six of the more than 850 servers failed the 25-month test. (The data room was filled with inert nitrogen gas, which could explain the low failure rates of the servers.)
Microsoft has accumulated a number of patents over the years, which it made open source in 2021. But until 2024the company had put the project in depth.
