Hanwha Ocean Unveils 60MW Floating Data Center Design at Gastech 2026

Hanwha Ocean has introduced a 60-megawatt floating data center concept, marking a significant push into the offshore infrastructure market as the global technology industry grapples with mounting constraints on power availability and land for artificial intelligence workloads. The South Korean shipbuilder said on September 13 that it will present the internally developed 60MW floating data center model at Gastech 2026, an energy exhibition that opens in Thailand on September 14.

A floating data center houses computing infrastructure on an offshore floating structure, enabling it to generate its own power at sea and draw on seawater for cooling. This approach addresses two of the most pressing challenges confronting land-based data centers: securing adequate power supply and suitable sites, and managing the heat generated by increasingly dense AI computing hardware. As demand for AI data centers accelerates worldwide, operators have struggled to find locations that can support the substantial energy and cooling requirements of modern server farms.

Hanwha Ocean has adopted a modular design philosophy for the platform, allowing power generation and supply methods, server types and overall data center capacity to be configured according to the installation location and specific customer requirements. The company recently received Approval in Principle from the American Bureau of Shipping for the conceptual design of the 60MW floating data center, a classification milestone that validates the technical feasibility of the concept.

In addition to the floating data center, Hanwha Ocean will showcase a model of a 174,000-cubic-meter zero-carbon liquefied natural gas carrier at the exhibition. The vessel is being developed with an electric propulsion system powered by an ammonia gas turbine, and the company aims to apply technology that eliminates the use of pilot oil even during ignition.

Son Young-chang, executive vice president and head of Hanwha Ocean's Product Strategy & Technology Institute, said the company will combine its shipbuilding and offshore technologies with Hanwha Group's energy and data capabilities to provide solutions that address the limitations of land-based data centers. The initiative reflects a broader trend of maritime and energy firms entering the data center infrastructure space as AI-driven demand strains conventional terrestrial capacity.