Plans Announced to Convert Car Carriers Into Floating Data Centres

As demand for data centres continues to climb amidst the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, one of the world’s leading shipping companies has teamed up with an energy transition specialist to convert a car carrier into a floating data centre. 

Mitsui O.S.K Lines (MOL) and Kinetics (an initiative of Karpowership) have announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that will see them collaborating on the design, construction and deployment of a state-of-the-art data centre hosted on a retrofitted vessel. 

It is planned for the floating data centre to be supplied with uninterrupted, dedicated power from a range of flexible sources, including Powerships developed by Karpowership. Other power options will include land-based grids, onshore solar farms, and offshore wind.

The value proposition of floating data centres lies in the fact that they are scalable, mobile, rapidly deployable, and can overcome traditional power constraints, land scarcity, and permitting delays. 

Commenting on the partnership, Mehmet Katmer, Chief Executive Officer of Kinetics, said: 

“This project represents a significant step toward our vision at Kinetics: delivering innovative, efficient, and sustainable infrastructure solutions that meet the energy needs of today and tomorrow. 

By pairing mobile power generation with floating data infrastructure, we are addressing critical market bottlenecks while enabling faster, cleaner, and more flexible digital capacity expansion”.

The initial pilot project will utilise an existing vessel with a gross tonnage of 9,731 tons, an overall length of 120m, breadth of 21.20m and a draft of 8.98m. The onboard data centre will have an expandable capacity of between 20 and 73 MW.

Tomoaki Ichida, Managing Executive Officer of MOL, also commented on the project, saying:

“This MoU represents an important step forward in leveraging the MOL Group’s assets and extensive expertise in ship operations to rapidly build digital infrastructure while minimising environmental impact. Moving forward, we will continue to expand a diverse range of social infrastructure businesses centred on the shipping industry. Through the advancement of our technologies and services, we are committed to proactively responding to society’s evolving needs, including the imperative of environmental conservation”.

Both MoL and Kinetics have highlighted several benefits of retrofitting existing vessels as data centres. These benefits include: 

• Reduced environmental impact of raw material extraction and processing by using existing vessel hulls.
   
• Reduced initial investment and operating costs. Furthermore, cooling systems that use seawater are highly energy efficient, reducing the amount of electricity consumed for server cooling and further reducing operating costs.
   
• Extensive space. With a floor area of approximately 54,000m², car carriers have equivalent space to one of Japan’s largest land-based data centres in terms of total floor area. 

Conversion of the vessel is set to begin in 2026, with the data centre expected to come into service in 2027. 

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