An Underwater Data Center in San Francisco Bay? Regulators Say Not So Fast

The YC-backed startup NetworkOcean plans to sink GPUs into San Francisco Bay. Multiple California regulators WIRED spoke with hadn’t heard about the test—and raised concerns about its potential environmental impact.

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 ...