Underwater data centers could test environmental protections in the Great Lakes

As tech companies and President Donald Trump’s administration continue pushing to build out more data centers to drive artificial intelligence development, some proposals are looking to move these facilities underwater.

Scientific American reported Oct. 27 that the Trump Administration is considering proposals for underwater data centers in Cook Inlet, Alaska, and the Gulf of Maine. 

While the preliminary permits requested by DeepGreen Holdings LLC would not give the company permission to begin construction, tribal nations and environmental groups have come out in opposition to the proposals, raising concerns about the impacts they could have on ocean temperatures and marine life, including two separate species of endangered whales that live and hunt at the project sites.

There are very few underwater data centers in operation across the globe. While Microsoft previously deployed an underwater data center near Scotland’s Orkney Islands to study the feasibility of underwater data centers, the company shuttered the project, with Noelle Walsh, the president of Microsoft cloud operations and innovation, telling Data Center Dynamics in 2024, “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.”

There are also two underwater data centers operating along the coast of China.

While mainland data centers have drawn concerns over their heavy electricity and water usage needed to cool to servers they contain, offshore data centers can use the water they’re immersed in to help cool the equipment.

Although the Great Lakes have not drawn any proposals for an underwater data centers, the region has proven attractive for data centers due to its plentiful freshwater resources. 

In response, environmental groups and policy experts have put together several recommendations and frameworks for addressing the influx of data center proposals, with the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a nonprofit focused on protecting the region’s waters, stressing that Great Lakes states are in need of a plan when it comes to managing increasing water use.

However, if a company were to propose a data center within the Great Lakes, there are guardrails in place, Helena Volzer, the alliance’s director of water resources, told Michigan Advance. While each state does things differently there generally needs to be some kind of permit approval for anything placed on the bottomlands of the Great Lakes, Volzer explained.

In addition to state-level permits, there would also need to be permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the federal government, Volzer explained. 

While speaking with the Advance, Miyoko Sakashita, the oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, noted that any federal permits also need to comply with the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act.

Volzer also pointed to public opposition to data centers within the region as another barrier a hypothetical Great Lakes data center would need to overcome.

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“I think if there’s resistance to building them on land for all of the resource reasons, I can only imagine the resistance there might be to building within the lakes themselves,” Volzer said.

As far as the environmental impacts, Volzer pointed to the warming of nearby waters as one key concern.

“Even in an ocean, you still have that concern. But in a sensitive freshwater ecosystem like the lakes, I would think that would be of even more concern,” Volzer said, noting how warming waters have exacerbated issues with harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie. 

Temperature changes can also harm fish populations, Volzer noted, explaining that when fish get accustomed to warmer waters, drops in temperature can kill them. 

Sakashita pointed to habitat impacts and noise pollution as major concerns in the center’s opposition to the proposed data centers in Maine and Alaska. 

“Many animals are very sensitive to noise for their communication or migration or hunting for food and things like that,” Sakashita said.

Construction of an underwater data center would also carry its own risks for pollution and disrupting the ecosystem, Sakashita explained.

Both Volzer and Sakashita noted that depending on the design of the data center, these developments could contain harmful chemicals that could pollute the waters.

Additionally, the energy source used by the data center could contribute to other environmental impacts, Sakashita explained, noting that the large amounts of power demanded by data centers could result in massive amounts of greenhouse gas pollution if they are powered by fossil fuels. 

The data centers in Maine and Alaska would be powered by tidal turbines if constructed. Sakashita noted that turbines can trap animal species and kill small organisms like zooplankton, which could hurt the amount of prey available for other species.

While Volzer was skeptical of the possibility and the feasibility of a data center making its way into the Great Lakes due to the costs, the public perceptions, and the regulations in place, Sakashita warned that those guardrails are under threat.

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, proposed in the U.S. Senate, contains rollbacks to the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, Sakashita explained, noting that tribal nations and states like Michigan could lose their authority over projects like an underwater data center if the bill becomes law.

“It’s really important for us to safeguard our bedrock environmental laws because they do give us some tools to make sure that projects like this are not doing a lot of damage to endangered species or to our habitats that are really important for wildlife,” Sakashita said.