Lind Marine, a ship manufacturer based out of California, has finished building a waterborne data center for Nautilus Data Technologies.
The barge was built at Lind's shipyard on the Mare Island Naval Complex in Vallejo, California,
The 'floating' facility has also been towed to the Port of Stockton, California, for permanent mooring, according to The Maritime Executive.
The barge of Eli
The vessel, Eli M, is a barge constructed in 1969 and has been refurbished to make it marine ready with the addition of 125 tons of structural steel repairs and modifications. The barge is comprised of 14 modules and weighs 700 tons.
Lind installed over 3,800ft of fused high-density polyethylene (so the plastic doesn't leak chemicals into the water), marine-grade stainless steel piping, turbine pumps, heat exchangers, and valves.
Electrical switchgear has also been installed for the data center.
Nautilus' 6MW data center is going to be water-cooled, using the natural resource floating around it. The raw water flow to support the cooling is around 4,500 gallons per minute (GPM) and can get up to a capacity of 12,000GPM from its eight pumps.
Nautilus says this method of cooling allows up to five times more power density per rack and has a smaller footprint than its competitors.
Two aluminum cable trusses (25,000lbs each) will allow the barge to be connected to cabling onshore at the Port of Stockton.
In May, Nautilus secured a loan from investment firm Orion Energy Partners to finish its ongoing projects including Eli M.
Microsoft has also been dabbling with the idea of marine data centers with Project Natick, an underwater data center program deployed off the coast of the Orkneys, Scotland.
