Karpowership, a Turkish company that builds floating power plants, is expanding into waterborne data centers in a bet they’ll be faster to build than onshore hubs as demand from artificial intelligence soars.

The firm’s Kinetics unit plans to develop some of the world’s first floating data centers in shipyards, sidestepping the permitting bottlenecks that can hold up onshore construction in key markets such as the US, Chief Executive Officer Mehmet Katmer said in an interview.

Companies across the world are getting creative in the rush to develop the infrastructure needed to power AI. The race to meet burgeoning demand has seen moves to restart shuttered nuclear plants and even a bid to build servers in space.

Putting data centers on the water is a relatively new concept. California-based Nautilus Data Technologies Inc. has deployed the technology on a small scale, and Microsoft Corp. is researching an underwater data hub. For Katmer, it’s a natural move for a firm that’s made its name building floating power plants.

“There’s a huge gap in terms of demand,” Katmer said in Istanbul. “So we said, OK, maybe we should work on what we feel we are comfortable doing, which is building floating infrastructure.”

In a first step announced earlier this month, London-based Kinetics will design and deploy a pilot project of as much as 73 MW with Japanese shipping firm Mitsui OSK Lines, scheduled to come online in 2027. Kinetics is in talks with several shipyards, and could also use its parent company’s facility in the Turkish shipping hub of Yalova, according to the CEO.

FLOATING HUB DESIGN
The concept is based on using seawater to cool the power-hungry servers inside. It’s an emerging — but initially more expensive — alternative to conventional air-cooling technology, which researcher Dell’Oro Group Inc. says could boost a data center’s energy efficiency by as much as 25%.

“In terms of capex, the initial investment cost, we’re still going through the numbers,” Katmer said. “But in terms of the operational cost — the biggest cost of this — then I think we would be very competitive.”

The main constraint on floating designs is capacity. The biggest data-center projects can stretch to hundreds of acres on land.

Kinetics is prioritizing the US and other developed markets such as Australia and the European Union, then plans to expand to emerging economies where it’s better known for producing electricity than consuming it.

Power for the floating hubs may be sourced from a link-up to the electricity grid or generated from liquefied natural gas, Katmer said.

The company has a fleet of 11 LNG vessels, including regular carriers and floating storage and regasification units that act as temporary import terminals. It intends to invest more in FSRUs to meet rising LNG-to-power demand in Southeast Asia, South America and Africa, according to Katmer, who said Kinetics is also in talks to charter out some of its fleet to third parties.