LOS ANGELES — Pressure testing confirms feasibility for sustainable subsea data centers developed by U.S company Subsea Cloud. The feasibility statement is the first milestone in allowing data centers to be placed subsea, drastically reducing U.S carbon emissions.

“After completing initial pressure testing of our underwater data center pods, we are happy to confirm structural integrity and optimal performance targets were reached at depths of 3,000 meters, or 9,481feet,” said Maxie Reynolds, co-founder and CEO of Subsea Cloud. “This is an important milestone toward our ambitious target to deploy hundreds of subsea data centers starting in 2022 and a major step toward decarbonizing them completely by 2026.”

Subsea Cloud will deliver latency- and carbon-reducing data center infrastructure and services, with a market focus on the U.S. and its financial, health care, and military industries, as well as converting some hyperscale players in the space from land-based centers to subsea centers. The subsea “pods” eliminate the need for electrically driven cooling and all water usage. The industry as a whole has come under scrutiny for its lack of sustainability.

The company is also undergoing a sustainability assessment with Gold Standard, a voluntary carbon offset program focused on progressing the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This will also help enable serial production of these data centers and deployment in areas where sustainability issues may have prevented this. The pods themselves are shipped to their destination and plugged into the grid subsea. 

“Our design and approach reduce latency and carbon emissions and afford our clients flexibility, scalability, and sustainability,” Reynolds said. “We can deploy rapidly and closer to where the data is needed than ever before. Moreover, growing pains for our clients are avoided.” 

Subsea Cloud’s centers will be installed in a modular fashion, providing green, affordable data center infrastructure. The first 10 pods to be deployed will offset more than 7,683 tons of CO₂ compared to an equivalent land-based center.

“Cloud infrastructure is a needed commodity, but, as an industry, it needs to decarbonize,” Reynolds said. “With a highly competitive product, we can deploy hundreds of these pods every year — we are geared for global impact.”