Underwater AI Data Center Plans Draw Pushback in Alaska and Maine
A little-known company, DeepGreen, wants to sink tidal-powered AI data centers off Alaska and Maine. Local officials and environmental groups are pushing back.
A newly formed company called DeepGreen wants to put artificial intelligence servers on the seafloor off Alaska and Maine, powered by tidal turbines and cooled by cold ocean water. The plans would be among the first underwater data centers in the United States. In both places, local officials say they learned about the projects from federal filings, and residents and conservation groups have been quick to object.
What is being proposed
The bigger of the two projects is in Cook Inlet, the long tidal estuary that runs south from Anchorage. The Anchorage Daily News reported that DeepGreen Cook Inlet SPV LLC, a Delaware-registered company, has applied to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the federal agency that licenses hydropower and tidal energy projects. The company wants to build a 100-megawatt data center with up to 350 underwater turbines and 66 seabed “hives” filled with AI servers. The project would sit in a corridor of about 1,650 acres west of the Nikiski shoreline on the Kenai Peninsula, in water 45 to 166 feet deep.
According to Alaska’s News Source, which reviewed the filing, the plan includes a 3.5-mile armored subsea cable carrying both power and fiber-optic data. The cable would come ashore in the Nikiski industrial corridor, between a fertilizer plant and a liquefied natural gas facility. Surplus electricity could be sent to the Railbelt, the state’s main power grid. FERC filings cited by the Anchorage Daily News estimate that preliminary engineering studies would take four years and cost $4.5 million. The company plans to pay for them with private equity and what it calls “Green-AI” investors.
The second project is in Maine. Maine Public reported that a sister company, DeepGreen Western Passage, applied to FERC in February for a permit covering Johnson Cove, on the northeast side of Eastport, a city of about 1,300 year-round residents on Passamaquoddy Bay. A pilot would use the bay’s 22-foot tides to run turbines producing up to 5 megawatts. A revised application says a full buildout could use up to 15 megawatts. The company has described the facility as sealed and “behind the meter,” meaning it would not draw power from the outside grid.
Both projects are tied to Louis Wolfson, the managing member of DeepGreen, whom the Anchorage Daily News identified as a luxury real estate developer in Needham, Massachusetts. The parent company, DeepGreen Holdings LLC, was formed in January 2026, the newspaper reported. Its registration discloses no ownership information.
Why officials are frustrated
Officials in both states say DeepGreen did not contact them before filing. In Alaska, Curtis Thayer, chief executive of the Alaska Energy Authority, the state agency named in the filing as a possible partner, told the Anchorage Daily News that DeepGreen had never reached out. He said some of the project details sent to FERC were “dead wrong.” The project would connect to the authority’s planned $400 million Cook Inlet PowerLink, a 38-mile undersea transmission line.
Peter Micciche, mayor of the Kenai Peninsula Borough, told Alaska’s News Source he had heard nothing from the company. “Sloppy is the way I would describe this approach,” he said. FERC also flagged problems. In a June 18 letter, agency staff cited “deficiencies” in the Alaska application, including missing dimensions for key underwater equipment. The newspaper reported that the company had also failed to notify the City of Kenai and to identify all affected tribes and Alaska Native corporations, and that it fixed those errors about a week later.
Wolfson told Alaska’s News Source it was too early to work with local lawmakers. He said a preliminary permit “does not authorize an applicant to disturb the seabed.” He also said the project would not go forward unless it could stay within federal limits on harm to marine mammals. In a statement to Maine Public, he described the effort as a “climate and decarbonization initiative” that is still in a “quiet, analytical stage.”
Environmental concerns
The concerns differ in each place:
- Cook Inlet: The Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group, has moved to intervene at FERC to block the Alaska permit. It says turbine noise could harm Cook Inlet beluga whales, an endangered population. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates about 300 of the whales remain.
- Eastport: Residents worry that heat released from submerged servers could harm lobsters, fisheries, whales and the local tourism economy, according to Maine Public.
Eric Masanet, a University of California, Santa Barbara researcher who studies data centers, told Maine Public that underwater data centers are achievable in principle. He pointed to Microsoft’s Project Natick, which tested a sealed server pod off Scotland. That experiment is no longer running.
What comes next
A FERC preliminary permit does not allow construction. It only reserves a site while a developer studies it. In Maine, the deadline for public comments, intervention requests and competing applications was Oct. 19, Maine Public reported. Eastport’s city council has already approved a 180-day moratorium on data center development on land and in the water. Two stricter ordinances, including a ban on data centers larger than 25,000 square feet, were headed to voters in November if the council did not pass them.
In Alaska, Kenai officials told Alaska’s News Source they plan to ask state lawmakers in Juneau to write oversight rules for data centers. Gov. Mike Dunleavy has courted tech companies to build in the state, even while acknowledging that Alaska has little spare power. The DeepGreen dispute shows how the AI industry’s hunt for cheap power and cooling is reaching remote waterfronts where few rules exist.
