<\/p>\n
Dallas startup Mousterian is planning to put its data centers on water to help with cooling and water usage.<\/p>\n
Photo illustration by Michael Hogue<\/p>\n
Data centers are blamed for being loud, ugly and using massive amounts of electricity and water. They\u2019ve also recently become politically toxic, leading to contentious public meetings in D-FW communities like\u00a0Red Oak<\/a> and Keller<\/a> and a surprise moratorium<\/a> from Gov. Greg Abbott.\u00a0<\/p>\n But those data centers, which sometimes occupy hundreds of acres and use the resource equivalent of small cities, are located on land, often near people\u2019s homes. A Dallas startup, called Mousterian, is taking a different approach: Developing data centers that float on water.\u00a0<\/p>\n The unique design, said Min Suh, Mousterian\u2019s CEO and cofounder, allows the floating data centers avoid municipal water supplies entirely, because they use the surrounding body of water as part of a closed-loop cooling system. The floating data centers also don\u2019t make noise and are ideally located near power plants, so they can access energy easily and avoid bothering residents, because people generally aren\u2019t living in such heavy industrial zones anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cWe like to think, \u2018If we are going to build a data center, we\u2019re trying to do it in the most sustainable way possible,\u2019 \u201d said\u00a0Suh.<\/p>\n \n\u2018We\u2019re killing ourselves\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n Now several years into an AI-driven construction boom, the United States is home to over 4,000 data centers, including more than 1,000 hyperscalers<\/a>, the largest facilities. Many of the biggest are in Texas, including Stargate<\/a>, a potentially $500 billion joint venture in Abilene led by OpenAI, and Frontier, an incoming 1,200-acre project in Shackelford County. Numerous projects are also underway in data center-heavy D-FW, which was recently ranked by Cushman and Wakefield as the top primary data center market<\/a> in the Americas.\u00a0<\/p>\n The boom has created a rush of Texas construction jobs<\/a> and been welcomed by many political and business leaders. \u201cI think of [data centers] almost like the highways and the airports that are the fundamental infrastructure of the future,\u201d Dallas Regional Chamber executive Mike Rosa told\u00a0<\/a>The News<\/a>\u00a0last year.<\/p>\n But the computing centers\u2019 vast energy and water consumption \u2014 the biggest culprit is their cooling systems \u2014 has emerged as a persistent flashpoint, prompting community outrage and various local and state moratoriums.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n In Texas, Abbott\u2019s new moratorium mandates an audit of pending data center projects that includes details on their cooling systems and impact on local water supplies, and politicians including Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico, the state\u2019s Democratic gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, are also loudly calling<\/a> for tighter water regulations.\u00a0<\/p>\n One controversial project \u2014 a planned data center about 60 miles southeast of Dallas that was expected to pull millions of gallons of water per day from Cedar Creek Lake, which also supplies drinking water for Fort Worth \u2014 was already scrapped. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re killing ourselves letting the data centers in,\u201d said Ashley Cook, a lawyer who led the fight against the project. \u201cYou\u2019re basically turning a rural residential peaceful community into an industrial corridor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Some industry leaders have pushed back against the water-guzzling stigma, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has called the water issue \u201ctotally fake\u201d<\/a> even while pushing for more renewable energy use. Experts say the consumption issues are in fact relatively nuanced<\/a> and localized. Each facility\u2019s design and technology is also important.\u00a0<\/p>\n \nBy space, ocean or fjord\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet as the world\u2019s seemingly insatiable demand for computing power keeps rising, developers have also been exploring more novel solutions. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, among others, have unveiled plans for data centers in space. Earlier this year, a wind-powered, underwater data center<\/a> began operating several miles off the coast of Shanghai. In Norway, a data center complex was built into an abandoned mine<\/a>, with seawater-based cooling from an adjacent fjord. \u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Several years ago, a California-based company called Nautilus Data Technologies developed the world\u2019s first floating data center, which it built atop a refurbished, 700-ton barge in the San Joaquin River at the industrial Port of Stockton. The two-story operation, which resembles a white shipping container, began operating in 2021 with a cooling system that cycles around 4,500 gallons of river water per minute, with screens that serve as filters to keep fish and plants out of the intake system. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The site proved more ecologically sustainable, with far lower electricity and operating costs than typical land-based operations, according to Nautilus. It was also well received by local officials, and attracted San Joaquin County as an anchor tenant.<\/p>\n For some of its developers, it also served as a launching pad: \u201cTaking those lessons of building the first floating data center,\u201d said Suh, \u201cwe kind of took all the best components of different technologies available and basically created this new company.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Suh, who has extensive data center experience but was not involved with the California floating data center project, cofounded Mousterian \u2014 the name refers to the Middle Paleolithic era, when humans first started using complex tools \u2014 with Chase Ott-Wick, a former senior engineer on the California project, and Gabe Andrews, another data center veteran and former Nautilus executive. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\u2018Pushing the envelope\u2019\u00a0\n<\/p>\n The 10-person company, which is self-funded and quietly launched last year, is based in downtown Dallas and handles data center design, engineering and development. In addition to floating data centers, it also develops land-based and water-adjacent facilities \u2014 Suh said it\u2019s best to characterize the company as \u201ca high-performance data center developer with unique facility offerings versus a purely floating data center company\u201d \u2014 but is broadly focused on delivering projects that require far less energy and don\u2019t use municipal groundwater.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the tech companies and hyperscalers were still maybe 10 to 15 years behind on how they were developing and delivering data centers,\u201d said Suh, who also pointed to conspicuous examples of companies building water-guzzling facilities in dry areas like the American West. \u201cAnd so we\u2019re trying to push the envelope the opposite way, by being kind of very water sensitive.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The startup has already landed major institutional partners: Earlier this year, in its highest-profile move yet, Mousterian signed an agreement with Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the world\u2019s largest shipbuilders, which last month led to an engineering contract to jointly develop a fleet of floating data centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Under the terms of the deal, Mousterian and the Korean manufacturing giant are co-designing the vessels, which will be manufactured by Samsung in South Korea and then shipped and finished by Mousterian likely in Texas or Louisiana. Mousterian is also designing the facilities\u2019 internal equipment.\u00a0<\/p>\n The floating data centers will have about a one-acre footprint and a capacity of about 50 megawatts, which roughly qualifies them as large data centers. (Stargate, the massive Abilene project, is designed for a capacity of up to 1,200 megawatts.)\u00a0<\/p>\n The plan is for the new floating fleet to be deployed in different locations around the U.S. Mousterian currently has a half dozen different project sites \u2014 featuring a mix of floating and land-based designs \u2014 in various stages, including a hybrid floating and land-based campus next to a power plant in Houston and what it\u2019s calling \u201ca large-scale floating campus\u201d in the San Jose, Calif. area.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Suh declined to provide more details about the other projects\u2019 locations, but the floating data centers are typically located in sites like deep river harbors or shipping channels, where they\u2019re moored close enough to land so that employees can easily walk back and forth between the floating facility and complementary land-based facilities.<\/p>\n \u201cWithin 30 seconds, you know, you\u2019re in a regular air-conditioned office, with a bathroom and kitchen,\u201d Suh said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The data centers will also source energy that\u2019s not connected to the public grid, while their pass-through water cooling systems will help give them a Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, score of 1.15 or 1.2, Suh said, which would rank among the industry\u2019s best. Traditional data centers\u2019 PUE scores, where 1.0 indicates perfect energy efficiency, are typically 1.5 or higher.\u00a0<\/p>\n The floating data center concept has its complications, said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, including a potentially high development cost, the access to large power sources and even environmental issues, if the warmer water discharging back into the water source disrupts marine life.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all a matter of how much money they want to spend,\u201d Hirs said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Another major challenge is identifying the right locations, because of the very specific requirements needed to make the projects work. But being an industry innovator also has its benefits.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s just that we\u2019re the only company looking for these sites right now,\u201d\u00a0Suh said, \u201cso we\u2019ve kind of had our pick.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Staff writer Lana Ferguson and columnist Dave Lieber contributed reporting\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dallas startup Mousterian is planning to put its data centers on water to help with cooling and water…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,143449],"class_list":["post-448444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-data-centers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n