NetworkOcean

NetworkOcean, a Y Combinator company founded by Sam Mendel and Eric Kim, planned to submerge capsules of GPU servers in San Francisco Bay, cooling them with seawater and pitching latency and efficiency benefits to the Bay Area AI industry. It announced the plan in August 2024 and built a prototype capsule. California regulators including the Bay Conservation and Development Commission challenged it for testing without permits, and no permitted underwater deployment has been publicly confirmed since.

Ecosystem functionThe category's cautionary tale — a reminder that frontier siting escapes the interconnect queue but not the environmental regulator.

Business modelSubsea GPU colocation