Ocean-powered data centers

A new CBS News video put an old engineering idea back in the AI spotlight: move data centers to the coast, or even offshore, and use the ocean for power and cooling. (cbsnews.com) The segment, published April 20, 2026, follows Panthalassa, a Vancouver, Washington company building floating data centers designed to run on wave energy. Chief executive Garth Sheldon-Coulson told CBS the company’s Ocean-3 design has no anchor and no power cable back to shore. (cbsnews.com) The basic pitch is simple: servers throw off heat, and cold seawater can carry that heat away like a giant radiator. On land, that same job usually needs chillers, fans, pipes, and large power supplies that can delay new capacity. (google.com) That is why coastal siting has become part of the data-center buildout, not just an environmental talking point. Google says its Hamina, Finland campus uses seawater from the Bay of Finland for cooling, and Portugal’s Start Campus says its Sines site pairs seawater cooling with 1.2 gigawatts of secured grid power and 100% renewable energy. (google.com) (startcampus.pt) Power is the bottleneck underneath all of this. A July 2024 U.S. Department of Energy report said hyperscale facilities are now requesting 300- to 1,000-megawatt connections with one- to three-year lead times, and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report said U.S. data-center electricity demand is projected to double or triple again by 2028. (energy.gov) (eta-publications.lbl.gov) Global demand is moving in the same direction. The International Energy Agency said in its April 2025 Energy and AI work that data centres accounted for about 1.5% of global electricity use in 2024, and it projects total data-center demand could reach roughly 950 terawatt-hours by 2030. (build-up.ec.europa.eu) (enlit.world) Putting servers near seawater is not a new concept, but most real deployments have stayed close to shore rather than fully at sea. Microsoft’s Project Natick tested an underwater data center off Scotland and said the submerged servers had one-eighth the failure rate of comparable land systems before the company ended the project in 2024. (natick.research.microsoft.com) (redmondmag.com) Ports and waterfront agencies are now studying the idea as industrial infrastructure. In June 2025, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore and Firmus Technologies signed a memorandum to study seawater-cooled AI facilities, including intake siting, discharge management, and environmental review. (mpa.gov.sg) (worldports.org) The catch is that ocean-adjacent computing still has to clear marine permitting, corrosion, maintenance, and network-connection hurdles. Panthalassa’s video moment lands before its first Ocean-3 units are expected to be operating in August 2026, so the next test is whether wave-powered hardware can move from demonstration to contracted capacity. (cbsnews.com) (nationaltoday.com)