Nautilus Data Technologies CEO on building waterborne datacentres in the name of sustainability

The company announced details of its second datacentre on 5 June 2021. It will be land-based and located in the US town of Millinocket, Maine, on the site of what was once one of the world’s largest paper mills, and where much of the US’s newsprint used to be created.

The site will have a projected capacity of 60MW of IT load once completed, and Connaughton hopes that this will pave the way for further regeneration in that area.

“Today, almost all datacentres are built in commercial real estate locations and are actually competing with urban centres for space,” he says. “That makes no sense because on the working side of every population centre in the world is an industrial zone and that is where the datacentre should go.

“There’s a lot of available power on the working side of these cities, and it’s where all the fibre runs before it hits these cities. So we are all about converting brownfields into greenfields, which makes us an ESG [environmental, social and governance] machine.”

There are a few others reasons why Nautilus selected Millinocket as the site of its first land-based datacentre, and one is because of how well it complements the company’s Irish growth plans.

“Ireland is one of the epicentres of digital because it’s the one of the furthest points west in Europe before you hop across to North America,” says Connaughton. “And this location in Maine is the other side of the Ireland story. Maine is to Europe what Ireland is to America, and our goal is to establish – on the west of Ireland and on the east of America – large computer exchange regions.

“That’ll be to facilitate all the [data] exchange, right across the continent, and have it be within the sovereign control of the US, and have it be within the sovereign control of the EU.”

The proximity of both locations to large bodies of water is another plus point, not just in the context of how the company regulates the temperature of its datacentres, but because it also supports Nautilus in achieving another of its goals – to make supercomputing resources more readily available to enterprises.

“In Ireland, the one thing that it has an abundance, beyond its very clever people, is an endless supply of naturally cold water,” says Connaughton. “And in Maine the same is true, which means you can make supercomputing available to everyone in the world, rather than the provinces of national laboratories, or university centres like Cambridge or Oxford.”

Connaughton claims the company’s Stockton facility is the greenest datacentre in the world, but it will lose that title once the server farm in Maine is completed because water will be drawn into the facility by gravity, rather than being pumped.

This unique feature of the site is made possible by its location, with the Maine datacentre sited close to a hydropower plant which will be feeding the server farm with electricity.

“There’s a reservoir for the hydropower plant, and there’s a big lake [attached to that] and we’re going to be below the lake,” says Connaughton.

“So we’ll take water – gravity-fed from the lake – through the datacentre and then the water will come out warm at the other end and, initially, we’ll just put that back into the hydropower plant’s discharge with no significant ecological change in temperature.”

At least that is the plan for the time being, although Connaughton says Nautilus in is in the midst of discussions with several parties that have expressed an interest in putting the slightly warmed water that will be dispelled from the datacentre to use.

“There’s a company interested in setting up greenhouses in Maine that could use the warm water, and we are looking at district heating,” he says. “We’re really going to experiment in Maine on this idea of creating a 100% emission-free, ultra-efficient datacentre with warm water as a by-product.”

Since the completion of its barge-based facility in Stockton, California, Nautilus now has verified proof that its approach to building datacentres is a goer, and with its other sites due to come online in due course, it is now courting clients to populate them.

“We are targeting both the hyperscale players and the large enterprises – especially those that want to future-proof their deployments for high-performance workloads – and those are the ones who are turning up to talk to us,” says Connaughton.

At the same time, however, Nautilus is keen to make space for smaller, “digitally dependent” businesses that are operating locally to where its datacentres are located to ensure it is doing its bit to aid the redevelopment of the surrounding areas.

“The next two [Limerick and Maine] projects will really perfect our design and deployment, but after that, the key will be to partner with local developers who want to develop datacentre sites with a water-cooled approach because it gives them greater optionality and a wider range of land areas that they can develop on,” says Connaughton.