Elon Musk wants to put data centres in space. The pitch is this: unlimited solar power, no water needed for cooling, and no planning permission fights with the neighbours.
The catch? Launching racks of GPUs into orbit is expensive, and space hardware fails in ways that are very hard to fix from the ground.
More grounded
Orcadian Energy's plan [well, it may Orcadian's or more likely the blue-print comes from its unnamed partner] is less exciting but a lot more grounded, literally. The AIM-listed developer has signed a joint development agreement with an American offshore data centre operator to explore turning its Earlham and Orwell gas fields in the Southern North Sea into a power source for a data centre built on the water rather than above the atmosphere.
Earlham's gas is too rich in carbon dioxide to be worth piping ashore, so it has sat undeveloped. Burning it at the field for power, then capturing and reinjecting the carbon dioxide underground, gives the gas a use without the emissions problem that killed off conventional export.
North Sea data centres?
The data centre would sit right next to the power source, disconnected from the UK grid entirely. That solves two problems at once: it avoids the years-long queue for a grid connection that is currently strangling new UK data centre projects, and it puts hyperscale compute somewhere nobody has to look at it or live next to it.
Seawater cooling is essentially free and abundant offshore, which matters when a single large data centre can use as much electricity as a small city and gallons of water to match.
None of this is confirmed yet. The agreement is non-exclusive, nobody has to sign anything, and Orcadian's resource estimates for the fields have not been independently verified. A competent person's report is due during the 90-day window the deal allows for.
Concept, not reality?
But as a concept, powering compute at sea with stranded gas beats powering it in orbit with rockets. It uses infrastructure and resources that already exist, rather than betting on hardware that has never been tested outside a lab.
The space data centre idea generates headlines. The offshore gas one might actually generate power.
