Engineers have proposed building data centers directly under offshore wind turbines.
The artificial intelligence boom is demanding ever more computing power, and with it, electricity. To reduce the load on the power grid, engineers have begun looking for unconventional locations for data centers.
American startup Aikido Technologies has proposed placing servers inside the submerged ballast tanks of floating wind turbines. The plan is to combine a 15–18 MW turbine, 10–12 MW of AI computing power, and a battery system in a single installation.
The platform’s design features three legs with ballast tanks approximately 20 meters long. These hold freshwater for buoyancy, while the upper portion will house servers cooled by seawater.
The company plans to test a 100 kW prototype off the coast of Norway later this year. These wind-powered offshore data centers could potentially provide from 30 MW to over 1 GW of computing power, lowering the carbon footprint of the AI industry.
