If there was a sliver of doubt that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, then the battle to power AI (artificial intelligence) has all but confirmed it.
By now, we know that AI programmes, and the data centres that propel them, are huge energy guzzlers. In fact, according to IEA (International Energy Agency) projections, the sector’s energy consumption is projected to grow a whopping 30% a year until 2030 – at which point AI will account for 3% of the global energy use.
It’s this insatiable appetite for space, power, and energy that’s pushed investment for AI into uncharted territory, leading to some innovative and unusual developments in recent years: think data centres being located in unusual locations, investments in fusion reactors – you get the idea. And one of the most revolutionary has been the idea to move server rooms offshore.
To give some perspective, the world’s very first commercial offshore wind-powered underwater AI data centre was launched by China off the coast of the Lingang Special Area in Shanghai in May 2026. It doesn’t rely on traditional, large land-based structures for server operations, but rather employs sealed capsules placed underneath the ocean surface.
Furthermore, it uses offshore seawater and wind cooling, near the wind power infrastructure that supplies the site its electricity needs. Interestingly, this isn’t China’s first outing when it comes to uniquely located data centres. Is this where data centres are headed next?
Data Centres And Their Unique Locations
The idea of offshore data centres might have taken off officially now, but this isn’t the first time that data centres are being shunted off to somewhere that’s not “land.” As the demand for data centres grew, a growing issue was finding sufficient space on land to build them and enough electricity to power them, prompting experts to devise innovative solutions.
For instance, one of the world’s craziest data centres is the one that Nautilus Data Technologies has been operating since 2021. The Stockton 1 data centre sits on a repurposed 90-metre-long freight barge on California’s San Joaquin river, with the idea being to take advantage of the river for water cooling.
It’s not the only one. One of the oldest of such innovative data centres is the Hamina data centre that Google designed by repurposing disused paper mills among scenic fjords in the Gulf of Finland. Thanks to the unique location, the data centre is cooled using seawater, which returns to the gulf later directly, thus significantly minimising any local water consumption and rendering the site sustainable and environmentally friendly. Did we mention that there’s even a data centre now sitting in an underground mine in the Italian Alps?
These designs aim to address multiple issues and pressures at once, rather than solving for a single bottleneck – especially more so in denser, land-constrained markets such as Singapore and other coastal hubs.
Offshore Data Centres: The Thought Process
The interest in offshore data centres has only been growing. Earlier in 2025, an NYK shipping line-led Japanese consortium announced plans to demonstrate a floating data centre at Yokohama’s Osanbashi pier. The idea? To eventually design a full-scale offshore facility powered by offshore wind while assessing the equipment’s operational stability and salt damage resistance in offshore environs.
Once realised, such floating offshore green data centres would allow for efficient utilisation of offshore wind power without being limited by or relying on onshore power grids.
The Japanese idea isn’t the only one. The Oregon-based start-up Panthalassa, which spent a decade developing its wave energy tech, is pioneering a data centre that floats in the deep ocean, connected by Starlink satellites and powered by wave energy. The waves will force water through a turbine, generating electricity to power AI chips sitting in a seawater-cooled container with no components that could be possibly vulnerable to the hostile ocean environment.
The solid-steel “nodes,” which mostly sit mostly underneath the ocean’s surface, recirculate the same water that eventually drives the generator, thus requiring no engine and producing no direct emissions. And since these floating data centres are so far away from land, all AI queries running through them will be handled via SpaceX Starlink satellite connections, which is the sole link back to land that these structures would ever require.
Then there are others thinking far into the future, like the floating wind platform built by Californian firm Aikido Technologies. It integrates renewable energy production with AI-capable computing, placing a wind turbine that comes with in-built battery storage alongside 10-12 megawatts of AI computing. The objective is to establish offshore areas as viable alternatives compared to land-limited designs by connecting data centres directly with floating wind turbines.
With a passive cooling mechanism that disperses heat into the adjacent seawater, this modular concept can also be built nearly 10 times quicker as compared to traditional offshore facilities. After all, as Sam Kanner, their CEO, said, we need to go offshore before we go off-world – and yes, we’ve even thought about data centres in space!
The Energy Argument
While questions will always swirl around how these facilities will endure, the fact is that most of these data centres are being designed to be sustainably sound and harness renewable energy. And despite operational challenges always remaining in the background, the fact is that offshore data centres are credible, site-specific choices that have moved beyond experimentation and have become a reality.
In case you missed:
- The World’s Craziest Data Centres – Part 2: The Race for Innovation
- Data Centre in a Mine Located in The Alps. What’s Next for Underground Data Centres?
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