A San Francisco startup says it has become the first company to run customer AI workloads from a floating data center powered by solar panels.

NetworkOcean says it has operated a single Nvidia H100 GPU powered by a 20kW solar array as part of a trial in San Francisco Bay. The customer using the GPU has not been disclosed.

Footage posted by the company shows a set of 12 floating panels linked to a container on a ship with the GPU server inside.

Founded in 2024 by Sam Mendel and Eric Kim, NetworkOcean was originally pursuing underwater data centers, but has now pivoted to a floating system utilizing solar energy.

Writing on LinkedIn, CEO Mendel said: “Our future is bottlenecked by the speed at which we can deploy power.

“We’re building floating solar arrays powering data centers at sea. This will soon be the fastest way to deploy new compute, skipping years of land, grid connections, and traditional infrastructure delays.”

He said the company went from “design to deployed in the water” in 53 days, and added: “This will soon become the quickest way to deploy new power, powering the most efficient and sustainable data centers on the planet.”

A spin-out from the Y Combinator incubator, NetworkOcean’s original plan for underwater data centers ran into difficulties when it was claimed the firm did not have the correct permits for a trial deployment in the Bay Area.

On its website, the firm outlines a roadmap that could see a 1MW array deployed at sea next year. It is targeting up to 1GW of power for compute by 2030.

DCD published an in-depth look at the burgeoning compute-at-sea sector in the latest edition of our magazine. Read it free of charge here.