The company describes the European Marine Energy Centre as a milestone in Project Natick, a years-long research effort to investigate “manufacturing and operating environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate lights out on the seafloor for years.” Because more than half of the world’s population lives within roughly 120 miles of a coast, underwater datacenters near coastal cities means “data would have a short distance to travel to reach coastal communities, leading to fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming and game playing as well as authentic experiences for AI-driven technologies,” the company says.