The artificial intelligence boom is driving unprecedented demand for data centers, raising concerns about their growing energy consumption, water use and carbon footprint. These challenges are making companies look beyond traditional land-based data centers.

Some developers are now exploring the ocean as a new location for AI infrastructure, hoping underwater data centers could improve energy use and cooling efficiency while using less fresh water and land area than onshore buildings.

My research focuses on the societal, organizational and environmental implications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and the digital infrastructure—including data centers—that supports its development and deployment. I see underwater data centers as a promising new approach for supporting the growth of AI.

But moving servers into the ocean does not make other underlying environmental challenges, such as energy consumption and carbon emissions, disappear. It also creates new concerns about harm to the marine environment, as well as questions about how these data centers can be regulated—and how companies can maintain and expand them if needed. Whether underwater data centers can become sustainable alternatives to traditional data centers depends on solving these economic, technical and environmental problems.