Right now, off the coast of Washington state, there’s a shipping container sitting on the seafloor running 800 servers.
It’s not a government project. It’s not a military installation. It’s a data center — your data center, effectively — owned by a startup called Subsea Cloud, housed in a pod named Jules Verne, and cooled entirely for free by the Pacific Ocean.
The internet is going underwater. And honestly? It should have done this years ago.
Okay but why
Here's the problem nobody has really talked about out loud until recently: data centers are water hogs. Like, big time.
The average land-based facility uses millions of gallons of water every single day just to keep the servers from overheating — and about half of that is estimated to be drinking water. They also burn enormous amounts of electricity running the cooling systems — about 40% of all the power a data center consumes goes purely toward keeping things cold. Not computing anything. Not storing anything. Just cooling.
You know like when your laptop sounds like it's either going to take off or blow up? Just can't handle those Excel macros, baby. Now think about that times a million.
Meanwhile, Big Blue is sitting right there. Infinite. Cold. Free.
Here's the physics, explained the way Subsea Cloud's founder explains it: walk on the beach on a hot summer day, and the sand is burning your feet. Step into the water, and it's immediately cool and refreshing. Water handles heat dramatically better than air or sand — it takes enormously more energy to raise the temperature of water than air. A data center running hot underwater barely moves the needle. The ocean just absorbs it.
You don't cool the servers. The ocean does it. Now you can live guilt-free when you make memes of your friends.
The woman who built it
Maxie Reynolds' career trajectory is genuinely one of the best we've seen.
She started as an underwater robotics pilot and subsea engineer — working oil rigs across the globe. Then she pivoted to ethical hacking and red teaming at PwC in Australia. Then she published a bestselling book in 2021 called The Art of Attack: Attacker Mindset for Security Professionals — literally a manual on how to break into things. She even got her own episode of Darknet Diaries, one of the biggest cybersecurity podcasts on the planet, where they describe her as someone who loves "breaking into buildings (legally), high-stakes physical intrusions, red team chaos."
Then in 2021 she built an infrastructure company whose entire security model is: the data is on the ocean floor, good luck getting to it.
She spent a decade professionally figuring out how to break into everything. Then she built the one thing that's nearly impossible to break into. That’s pretty damn cool.
Check out her full story — linked here — it's worth your time.
What they're actually building
Each pod is the size of a standard 20-foot shipping container. They can sit anywhere from 10 feet to 12,000 feet deep and can connect directly to existing undersea fiber cables — the same ones already carrying 95% of the world's internet traffic. Deployed in 12 weeks from contract to live.
source - https://subseacloud.com/about
That last part matters more than it sounds. About 40% of the world's population lives within 60 miles of a coast. Right now, the average person is about 250 miles from their nearest data center. That distance creates lag. Move the server underwater, next to the coast, next to the cable — and you cut latency dramatically.
Your Instagram loads faster because a shipping container is sitting on the seafloor near your city. Bikini Bottom just became prime real estate.
The honest take
Microsoft tested underwater data centers for years under Project Natick. The results were genuinely impressive — fewer server failures underwater than on land, better reliability, lower costs. Then in 2024, Noelle Walsh, Microsoft's head of cloud operations, told Data Center Dynamics: "I'm not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world." She also said: "My team worked on it, and it worked."
They proved it worked. Then they stopped.
That's worth sitting with. The biggest infrastructure company on earth ran the experiment, liked the results, and still walked away.
Subsea Cloud is at an earlier stage than some companies we've covered. And although the road from proof of concept to scaled global infrastructure is long, we genuinely believe in Reyonds and her team. Read their About page. Hit those drop-downs. This Company has undeniable technology and a confidence and swagger that’s hard to ignore.
What Reynolds says about her competitors: "They are the inefficient, wasteful, timeworn data centres that create long-lasting business, environmental and societal problems from the day they are built."
She's not wrong. The current model burns water and money at a scale most people never think about. The alternative is right there, has been right there, and the ocean has been waiting patiently for 4.5 billion years.
If they pull this off
Every coastal city becomes a candidate for ultra-low-latency compute. The data center land grab — billions of acres, millions of gallons, endless cooling bills — starts to look unnecessary. The ocean was always the answer. It just took someone who spent a decade breaking into buildings to figure out how to put the servers where nobody can follow.
Why is the data center gone? Because it's at the bottom of the ocean, Carl.
Go to the field: subseacloud.com
Want to work out there? 🌾
Subsea Cloud doesn’t have a careers page available. Yet. But with the growth potential here and the size of the problem they're solving, we think Maxie would hire if you've got the talent and growth mindset. Worth a shot — connect with Maxie directly on LinkedIn.
Company Website → subseacloud.com
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