The Japanese shipping company Mitsui O.S.K. Lines (MOL) and Kinetics, the energy transition initiative of the Turkish powership specialist Karadeniz, plan to jointly develop the world’s first integrated platform for floating data centers. A corresponding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has now been signed.
The concept envisions converting existing ships in the fleet into offshore data centers. The units will be operated with an uninterruptible power supply from multiple sources, including Karadeniz powerships, land-based power grids, solar farms or offshore wind farms. According to the project partners, the capacity will range between 20 and 73 MW, depending on the module configuration. The servers will be cooled directly with seawater or river water in an energy-efficient manner.
According to the companies, the floating solution offers a scalable, mobile and quickly deployable alternative to conventional data centers on land. It is designed to overcome power supply bottlenecks, space shortages and long approval times. “By combining mobile power generation with floating data infrastructure, we are eliminating critical market bottlenecks and enabling faster, cleaner and more flexible expansion of digital capacity,” explains Kinetics CEO Mehmet Katmer.
The first offshore data center is expected to go into operation in 2027. The conversion of a ship will take around one year, significantly faster than the construction of a land-based data center. MOL, headquartered in Tokyo, sees the project as an example of resource cycles in the infrastructure sector and a contribution to decarbonization and digitalization.
