Karthik Ramasamy Raja
Construction Technology
October 2025
The exponential growth of digital infrastructure has intensified the environmental footprint of data centers, particularly in energy consumption and cooling. Undersea data centers (UDCs) emerge as a promising alternative, leveraging the marine environment for natural cooling and proximity to offshore renewable energy sources. This paper conducts a comprehensive qualitative review to assess the sustainability of electricity composition for UDCs. By synthesizing literature on marine engineering, renewable energy integration, and environmental science, we analyze the viability, challenges, and implications of powering UDCs with sources like offshore wind, tidal, and wave energy. Furthermore, we propose a structured technical methodology for deploying modular UDCs and present a comparative analysis highlighting their advantages over terrestrial models in terms of Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), hardware reliability, and land use. The findings indicate that while UDCs offer significant sustainability benefits, their development is contingent upon overcoming engineering constraints, ensuring minimal ecological disruption, and advancing policy frameworks. The study concludes that UDCs represent a critical pathway toward a more sustainable digital infrastructure, provided their deployment is guided by rigorous environmental assessment and integrated energy planning.
80- 91
© Airo Journals 2021
