The Trump administration is exploring plans for underwater datacenters in US waters, with reports suggesting four sealed-pod facilities could be built off the shores of Maine and Alaska. The move reflects broader interest from technology companies in locating datacenters underwater, where they largely eliminate community opposition that has plagued land-based facilities. Two underwater datacenters are already operating off China's coast, and a Microsoft project deployed off northern Scotland in 2018 reduced server failures by 87 percent compared with on-land equivalents over two years, though Microsoft said it has no plans to deploy underwater datacenters at present.
The cool, freshwater Great Lakes, which supply drinking water to 30 million people in major cities including Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, have emerged as a potentially attractive location for tech companies. At a campaign rally in Ohio last month, Donald Trump said of datacenters: "There's so much money to be made for Ohio... they'll go to China... we want them." The federal Environmental Protection Agency said it "supports development of data center infrastructure that is essential to remaining the world leader in Super Intelligence while using its statutory authorities to protect water quality."
Environmental groups and local officials have raised significant concerns about the ecological consequences. Lake Erie, the warmest of the five Great Lakes during summer, already ranks as one of the country's most polluted large lakes and suffers from harmful algal blooms. John Lipaj of the Lake Erie Foundation, an Ohio non-profit, warned that datacenters generate substantial heat and discharge fluids containing batteries and electrical equipment that could cause "catastrophic failure." Helena Volzer of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, based in Chicago, noted that even small temperature increases of 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit can cause thermal shock to aquatic organisms, altering metabolism, reducing oxygen availability and disrupting food webs.
In past proposals, Ohio's state government, where Republicans hold a supermajority, sought to make it easier for datacenter companies to discharge wastewater into public waterways, but the state EPA denied that measure last July following public outcry. On 3 November, residents of Conneaut, a Lake Erie community of about 12,000 people northeast of Cleveland, voted in favor of a charter amendment prohibiting large datacenter construction in their area. Of eight US Great Lakes states, only New York currently has a temporary state-wide moratorium on datacenter construction, ending in mid-2027. Ohio's EPA said it has not yet received any applications to permit an underwater datacenter in its part of Lake Erie. The Lake Erie Foundation has contacted state representatives and senators in New York, Ohio and Michigan to urge them to establish regulations before datacenter developers make proposals.
Experts remain divided on feasibility. Nir Kshetri, a professor of emerging technologies at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, said underwater datacenters offer significant cooling advantages and can locate near large population centres without latency problems. However, environmental challenges persist: last winter saw one of the most extensive Great Lakes freeze-ups in decades, with almost all of Lake Erie freezing several feet deep, and experts say it remains unclear how ice cover could affect underwater projects.