The latest round of underwater data centers is taking shape. Highlander Digital Technology has a 24-megawatt facility running off the coast of China, powered by an offshore wind farm. A Portland startup called Panthalassa has Peter Thiel money and a plan to put autonomous server pods in international waters connected via Starlink. Capital Clean Energy Carriers signed an MoU with Samsung and Lloyd's Register earlier this month on a data-center-on-ship deployment. Nautilus actually shipped its Marseille facility, and the Stockton deployment is still up at six and a half megawatts. The Register wrote it up this week under the headline that did most of the editorial work for the show: datacenters dip a toe back into waterborne computing despite obvious challenges.

The word that matters in that headline is "back." Microsoft ran Project Natick fr ...