• The contract follows an April agreement that assigned project development to Mousterian and marine engineering and construction work to Samsung Heavy
  • No project site, tenant, contract value or construction order has been disclosed

The fact

Samsung Heavy Industries and US developer Mousterian Corporation have signed an engineering contract for floating data centres, TradeWinds reported. The deal follows an agreement reached in April to develop projects in the United States. Mousterian will identify sites and tenants and lead project development, while Samsung Heavy will handle the engineering, fabrication and construction of the floating platforms.

Samsung Heavy has already received approval in principle from ABS and Lloyd’s Register for a 50MW design. This covers the general concept, not a specific commercial project. The companies have not yet named a site or customer, disclosed the contract value, placed a construction order or confirmed a delivery schedule.

The assessment

The engineering contract allows Samsung Heavy to begin translating project requirements into a site-specific design rather than working only on a general floating platform concept. To do that, the partners will need to define the computing load, power supply, cooling system, network connection and shore infrastructure for an individual location.

Those decisions cannot be completed from the existing concept approval alone. A floating data centre must be designed around the conditions of its site and the requirements of its tenant, including how electricity and connectivity reach the platform and how equipment is installed and maintained. For BTW readers, the immediate constraint is no longer the absence of a technical concept. It is the lack of a defined commercial project with a site, customer and infrastructure requirements that Samsung Heavy can design and build against.

What to watch

Watch for the partners to identify a US site, tenant, power arrangement and network connection. Those disclosures would confirm that the engineering work is tied to a defined project. A later construction order would provide stronger evidence that the design has moved from development into delivery.