Massachusetts firm seeks study permit for a 66-pod undersea data center in Cook Inlet

The plan is to put 66 pods of artificial intelligence servers on the bottom of Upper Cook Inlet, 45 to 166 feet down, cool them with seawater, and power them with 330 to 350 turbines spun by the tide. A hybrid power and fiber cable would run three and a half miles to shore and come up in the Nikiski industrial corridor, between the nitrogen plant and the LNG facility. The array would cover about 1,650 acres of seabed.

The company proposing it is DeepGreen Cook Inlet SPV, a Delaware entity whose parent was formed in January of this year. Its managing member, Louis Wolfson, works out of Needham, Massachusetts. Asked in the federal filing what qualifies it to attempt this, the company pointed to "management's expertise in real estate development and appraisal," and said it would fund roughly $4.5 million in preliminary engineering studies through private equity and what it called Green-AI investors.

Cook Inlet's tidal range is among the largest in North America, which is what draws tidal developers to it. The same water carries glacial silt and winter ice, and earlier tidal efforts there have not gotten built.

Someone is already working the site. Ocean Renewable Power Company has held the preliminary permit for that stretch of Cook Inlet since 2021 and filed a draft license application in March. DeepGreen filed on the same water in February, then supplemented it in June after federal regulators found the application incomplete.

It is not the only one. The same parent company filed a nearly identical application for Western Passage off Eastport, Maine, using the same turbine and pod design, and regulators found similar problems with that one.

What is in front of the commission now is narrow. A preliminary permit does not authorize construction, or digging, or entering anyone else's land or water. It buys up to four years of priority to study a site and file for an actual license, ahead of anyone else who wants it.

The company puts the project at about 100 megawatts, most of it feeding the data center, with anything left over going to the Railbelt grid. Its filing describes tying into the Alaska Energy Authority's planned $400 million transmission line across the inlet.

Comments, competing applications and motions to intervene are due Nov. 2 at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.