Data centers powering the generative AI boom are gulping water and exhausting electricity at what some researchers view as an unsustainable pace. Two entrepreneurs who met in high school a few years ago want to overcome that crunch with a fresh experiment: sinking the cloud into the sea. Sam Mendel and Eric Kim launched their company, NetworkOcean, out of startup accelerator Y Combinator on August 15 by announcing plans to dunk a small capsule filled with GPU servers into San Francisco Bay within a month. "There's this vital opportunity to build more efficient computer infrastructure that we're gonna rely on for decades to come," Mendel says. The founders contend that moving data centers off land would slow ocean temperature rise by drawing less power and letting seawater cool the capsule's shell, supplementing its internal cooling system.

It all started at the ThinkWeek event at Microsoft in 2014, this event is to gather employees and share their ideas out-of-the-box. An idea popped up to save energy and provide a quick cloud service to the coastal population. Later this idea turned into a project called Project Natick. Essentially it is an underwater data center. Underwater data centers are an innovative solution for storing and processing data that offers numerous benefits over traditional land-based facilities.