Nautilus Data Technologies

Nautilus built barge-mounted data centers cooled by pumping river or sea water through a closed-loop heat exchanger, avoiding mechanical chillers entirely. Its 7MW Stockton 1 barge in California was commissioned in 2021 and reached high occupancy, but the company put it up for sale in 2024. It has since pivoted away from floating vessels toward a land-based water-cooling product line applying the same technology on shore.

Ecosystem functionProved floating data centers work commercially and then walked away from them, which makes its pivot the single most useful data point about the category's operating economics.

Business modelWater-cooled colocation and cooling tech