As artificial intelligence devours electricity and real estate, the modern data center has gone underground, underwater — and soon, maybe, off-planet. Engineers are playing a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with the world’s most power-hungry buildings.
Above the clouds
Google’s Project Suncatcher and Jeff Bezos’s vision of “gigawatt-scale data centers in space” imagine satellite constellations powered by continuous sunlight and linked via optical communications. By mid-2030s, orbital compute could approach terrestrial costs per kilowatt-year — at least on paper. The engineering hurdles, from radiation shielding to launch economics, are enormous, but the ambition signals how far the industry is thinking.
Below the waves
When Microsoft’s Project Natick submerged a sealed server pod off Scotland’s coast, it ran for two years with one-eighth the failure rate of land-based peers. The cold, consistent seawater handled the cooling for free. Follow-ups in Asia are testing larger, longer deployments. Yet saltwater and maintenance logistics remain obstacles; each capsule must be self-contained, retrieved, and rebuilt after its mission cycle ends.
For now, traditional campuses still dominate, but the definition of location is expanding fast.
Beneath the surface
In Helsinki, an underground facility carved into bedrock now heats thousands of homes with its waste energy. Similar ideas are surfacing in the U.S., where developers are converting defunct mines and bunkers into secure, naturally cool campuses sometimes turning an environmental liability into a civic asset. These experiments share a motive: energy. Each approach seeks stable, cheap, and sustainable power in an era when land, labor, and grid capacity are tightening. For now, traditional campuses still dominate. But the definition of location is expanding fast, and those tracking where data lives will soon be looking in some very unfamiliar directions.
