The massive rise in global demand for data processing and storage, along with many challenges in traditional land-based infrastructure, has led the market to look for unconventional ways to solve these issues. Enter floating data centres. The major advantage of these kinds of facilities is flexibility, since any port with grid and fibre-optics access can host such a facility. US-based company Nautilus Data Technologies is a pioneer in this emerging maritime field. It has an operational floating data centre, named Stockton 1, fitted on a 90 m long-meter barge and cooled using nearby natural water sources. It is located at the Port of Stockton on the San Joaquin River and delivers up to 7MW of IT capacity. The data centre has been operational since 2021. The company also has a floating data centre in Ireland. Other facilities do exist, but they are either extremely small or are not floating ones but submerged under water, such as China’s Hainan Underwater Intelligent Computing Centre. When fully developed, it is expected to have a capacity of around 5MW to 6MW of total IT capacity. But there has been more discussion about using these sorts of facilities to assist the data computing sector in recent months. Just this month, Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) signed a memorandum of understanding with Kinetics, an energy transition initiative by Karadeniz subsidiary Karpowership, to develop a next-generation floating data centre platform by 2027. In the US, data centre water consumption is around 1.7bn litres per day The two companies will design, construct, and deploy a data centre hosted on a 120 m long retrofitted car carrier. The completed floater will have a capacity between 20MW and 73MW, depending on module configuration, with direct water-cooling using seawater or river water. This was not the only Japanese floating data centre agreement signed in the past few months. Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), architecture firm NTT Facilities, renewable developer Eurus Energy Holdings, MUFG Bank, and the city of Yokohama are also planning to develop an offshore floating data centre demonstration project. They will use a 25 m by 80 m barge moored at Yokohama port’s Osanbashi pier. Other countries are also looking at similar projects. Russia’s National Technology Initiative and China are also looking into building such facilities, with the latter already operating a pilot project. French firm Denv-R launched its 100kW floating data centre powered by solar panels in October last year. Four upsides make this sort of data centre highly interesting for companies. One was already mentioned – most modern ports can host one. The other three are perhaps even more interesting. The price of real estate and land has gone up in most parts of the world. In island countries like Japan and Singapore, it is becoming increasingly more expensive and difficult to find space to store onshore centres. Other countries like China or the US can afford to give 994,062 sq m or 668,901 sq m, respectively, to house the world’s two largest data centres. The US houses over 5,000 data centres in total, almost 10 times more than Germany and the UK in second and third place. In the US, data centre water consumption is around 1.7bn litres per day. That is relatively small when compared to the country’s total water consumption of 1.2trn litres per day. However, according to a paper done by David Mytton from the University of Oxford, there are issues of transparency with less than a third of data c