Is This a Viable Solution For Energy-Hungry Data Centres?

The astonishing and accelerating demands of AI computing are forcing data centre developers to find innovative solutions when building these power-hungry facilities.

Credit: Aikido

One is to build them into floating offshore installations where wind turbines can harness renewable energy to power them, and where the cold ocean waters can disperse the heat generated by the data banks. This is what San Francisco-based offshore wind-power developer Aikido Technologies has developed. It's a data bank/wind turbine combination that will be deployed in the frigid waters of the North Sea as a prototype in 2027 to test whether or not it can work effectively to disperse heat and resist the famously corrosive marine environment.

“We have this power from the wind. We have free cooling. We think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data-center solutions,” Aikido CEO Sam Kanner told IEEE Spectrum. “This crunch in the next five years is an opportunity for us to prove this out and supply AI compute where it’s needed.”

Data centres currently suffer from a nimbyism (“not-in-my-backyard”) problem on land. Their phenomenal rate of energy consumption has been found to drive up local electricity costs, while they also require substantial amounts of land and cooling power. As a result, developers are increasingly looking for innovative solutions that don't upset local communities. Far offshore is one solution. Another is currently perceived as crazy: outer space. But you never know.