A ten-person Dallas startup called Mousterian wants to solve the region's data center water problem by floating the buildings on rivers and harbors instead of building them on dry land. The company, founded in 2025 and based in downtown Dallas, has signed an engineering contract with South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries to co-design a fleet of floating data center vessels, each intended to deliver about 50 megawatts of critical IT capacity and occupy roughly one acre of footprint.
A Signing Ceremony and a New Kind of Data Center
The agreement, executed at a signing ceremony on July 22, 2026, marks the first official project under a framework the two companies announced in April 2026, according to Dallas Innovates. Samsung Heavy Industries will manufacture the vessels in South Korea, while Mousterian will finish them likely in Texas or Louisiana and is designing the facilities' internal equipment, according to reporting from The Dallas Morning News. Mousterian was co-founded by CEO Min Suh along with Chase Ott-Wick and Gabe Andrews, and the company currently has about six project sites in various stages, per the same account, including a hybrid floating and land-based campus next to a power plant in Houston and a large-scale floating campus planned for the San Jose, California area.
Suh has said Mousterian is designed to build data centers off-site so that fabrication can proceed in parallel with sitework rather than waiting until after it, according to a statement carried by signalnewssacramento.com. The planned facilities are meant to sit adjacent to existing power generation assets, and Mousterian describes its bulk cooling system as non-evaporative, consuming no potable water and returning zero process discharge to the surrounding waterway, per the same release. Mousterian's floating units are typically sited in deep river harbors or shipping channels, ideally near power plants, and are designed to make no noise, using the surrounding body of water as part of a closed-loop cooling system that avoids municipal supplies.
Why North Texas Is Ground Zero
The timing lines up with a data-center boom that's straining North Texas infrastructure. Eighteen of 31 surveyed cities and counties across the region have already approved or are actively considering a data center, according to a survey from the North Central Texas Council of Governments. Water supply was the top infrastructure worry, cited by 96% of respondents, ahead of electric-grid capacity at 81%, and high water consumption topped the list of environmental concerns at 93%. Only 16% of surveyed local governments said they had clear policies for evaluating data center proposals, while 72% disagreed that such policies exist.
Dallas-Fort Worth was ranked the top primary data center market in the Americas, per Cushman and Wakefield, and Dallas ranked as the No. 1 primary data center market in the world for the first time in the firm's 2026 comparison. The U.S. now has more than 4,000 data centers, including over 1,000 hyperscale facilities, and Texas is home to some of the industry's biggest bets, including the potentially $500 billion Stargate joint venture in Abilene, designed for up to 1,200 megawatts of capacity, and the incoming 1,200-acre Frontier project in Shackelford County.
Efficiency Claims and an Industry Under Scrutiny
Mousterian describes its floating data centers' power usage effectiveness (PUE) as very low, a measure of energy efficiency where 1.0 represents perfect efficiency. Floating and ocean-based data centers more broadly are emerging as a response to land, power and cooling constraints in dense coastal markets, according to Data Center Knowledge. Global data center electricity consumption hit about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 and is projected to more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, the outlet reports, though it also notes floating installations face real engineering hurdles, from marine hardening and maintenance logistics to power delivery and dependence on subsea cables, with industry experts cautioning there's very little testing on how IT equipment behaves under low-frequency motion.
Not everyone in North Texas is convinced the floating approach or the industry's broader promises hold up. A data center project near Cedar Creek Lake was scrapped after it was expected to draw millions of gallons of water per day, and resident Ashley Cook has said the wave of projects is turning a rural residential community into an industrial corridor. OpenAI's Sam Altman, for his part, has called the data center water issue totally fake, according to public comments cited by the Morning News. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has since imposed a moratorium requiring an audit of pending data center projects, one that includes details on cooling systems and impacts on local water supplies.
How Mousterian's Pitch Compares to Other Floating Projects
Mousterian isn't the first to try building data centers on water. Nautilus Data Technologies developed what it calls the world's first floating data center, built atop a refurbished 700-ton barge in the San Joaquin River at the Port of Stockton and operating since 2021, with San Joaquin County as an anchor tenant. Nautilus says the facility uses about 4,500 gallons of river water per minute for cooling, and the company has described the project's capacity variously as 6, 6.5 and 7 megawatts across different statements, with a claimed 1.15 PUE, according to Nautilus.
Other water-based projects have taken shape internationally. China's underwater data center in Shanghai began full commercial operations in May 2026 after launching a year earlier, according to the Maritime Executive. Singapore's Keppel has invested in floating data-center plans and signed an earlier memorandum of understanding, while Microsoft tested an underwater data center through Project Natick. Elsewhere, a Norway data center complex was built into an abandoned mine, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have separately unveiled plans for data centers in space — evidence, alongside Mousterian's approach, that the industry is scrambling for alternatives to land-based cooling. Suh has said Mousterian aims to build data centers in the most sustainable way possible.
