Vattenfall and Project Enki explore data centres on offshore wind farms

Vattenfall, Amsterdam-based AI data centre startup Project Enki and technology company ABB are jointly investigating whether data centres can be physically located on offshore wind farms. The collaboration was announced in late June 2026. The partners are still at an early stage: a first concrete location has yet to be identified.

The idea is to connect computing facilities directly to energy generation at sea, so that electricity does not need to travel through the overloaded onshore grid. The growing demand for computing power, driven in part by AI applications, is increasingly running into grid congestion and limited space on land. By building data centres offshore, that bottleneck could largely be bypassed.

Project Enki is based at the World Trade Center in Amsterdam and positions itself as a European AI data centre startup. The company has raised a total of approximately $573,000 across two seed rounds, with investors including Bamboo Ventures and angel investor Justin Kan. Vattenfall is a Swedish state-owned company that operates offshore wind farms in several European countries. ABB supplies the electrical systems and acts as technology partner in the study.

How the concept works

Offshore wind farms already generate large volumes of electricity, but transmitting it to shore involves losses and requires costly cable infrastructure. By placing a data centre directly on or adjacent to a wind farm, the generated electricity is consumed on-site. This makes the installation less dependent on available grid capacity onshore.

Nardi Polak, Head of Supplier Innovation at Vattenfall, and Paul Kunneman, Managing Director at Project Enki, are leading the project together. The partners indicate that the facilities do not necessarily have to be located in Dutch waters; the study focuses on offshore wind sites across Europe.

ABB contributes its expertise in maritime electrical systems. The company has experience with high-voltage connections and switchgear for offshore applications, which is relevant for connecting energy-intensive computing systems to wind turbines at sea.

Technical and logistical challenges

Building and maintaining data centres at sea involves considerably more complexity than onshore installations. Salt water, storm conditions and limited accessibility for technicians place high demands on the housing, cooling and redundancy of the systems. Microsoft previously tested an underwater data centre in its Project Natick experiment, but ultimately concluded that the practical limitations were too great for large-scale deployment.

The partners acknowledge that they are in an exploratory phase. Identifying a suitable first location is one of the immediate next steps. Only then will it become clear which technical solutions are feasible and what the costs would be compared with conventional onshore data centre sites.

Background to the capacity shortage

The Netherlands has been dealing with grid congestion for several years: grid operators Liander and TenneT can no longer connect new large consumers in large parts of the country. Data centres are typically large consumers and are therefore increasingly facing long waiting times or a complete halt on new connections. In the Amsterdam region, traditionally one of Europe's largest data centre hubs, a moratorium on large-scale new expansions has been in place for some time.

At the same time, demand for computing power is rising rapidly. Training and running AI models requires far more energy than traditional cloud or hosting services. This makes the combination of offshore wind energy and computing facilities conceptually attractive: the electricity does not need to be delivered onshore, and the data centre does not need to be located near an overloaded transformer station.

What happens next

The trio of Vattenfall, Project Enki and ABB has not yet announced a timeline for when the feasibility study will be completed. No funding amounts have been attached to this specific project either. Project Enki itself is a young startup with limited demonstrated capital; it remains to be seen how much additional financing will be needed to advance the study into a concrete construction phase.

For the broader European AI and energy infrastructure market, this initiative signals that parties are looking for creative workarounds to the grid congestion problem. Whether offshore data centres will prove viable at scale depends on factors such as maintenance costs, insurance requirements and the willingness of grid operators and governments to regulate and permit new offshore infrastructure concepts. On that last point in particular, many open questions remain in Europe, including for other founders and investors considering similar solutions.