Dallas- and Seongnam, South Korea-based Mousterian Corp. (M3) has emerged from stealth and announced a partnership with Samsung Heavy Industries “to jointly develop and deliver institutional-grade floating data center projects worldwide.”

M3—a developer of “floating” and water-adjacent data center infrastructure—said that it will lead “development, site origination, tenant sourcing, and project delivery” on the joint project.

M3 is headquartered in Dallas, according to a company statement, with leadership that includes the team behind the world’s first operational floating data center, as well as “senior executives drawn from data center operations, infrastructure policy, and capital markets.”

Putting data centers on barges to speed development of AI compute capacity

Writing on LinkedIn, M3 CEO Min Suh said his company was launching  “after working quietly in stealth for the last year.” 

“We’re building fully liquid-cooled floating and water-adjacent data centers—deploying directly alongside existing power generation—to bypass the 5+ year interconnection queues that are bottlenecking AI infrastructure today here in the U.S,” Suh wrote in the post. 

“Most of the industry is racing to build new power,” he added. “We took a different angle. An enormous amount of baseload generation already exists—particularly at water-cooled thermal plants—that sits underutilized, curtailed, or stranded behind grid constraints. Activating what’s already there is faster, cleaner, and more capital-efficient than greenfield build.”

By deploying compute “on barges adjacent to these assets,” Suh said M3 and SHI can compress development timelines “from years to quarters” and turn on data hall capacity that’s needed today.

Partnering with one of the world’s largest shipbuilders

Founded in 1974 and with a U.S. office in Houston, Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) is one of the world’s largest shipbuilders and a leader in offshore and maritime engineering. SHI designs and delivers a wide range of vessels and floating offshore assets—everything from liquid natural gas carriers to drillships to floating production platforms—for customers around the world.

In the joint project, SHI will contribute its “engineering, fabrication, and delivery capabilities” for floating maritime assets at scale, M3 said.

“SHI’s shipbuilding scale, balance sheet, and engineering depth, paired with M3’s high performance floating data centers, customer relationships, capital markets access, and power pipeline, gives customers a highly credible and de-risked path to gigawatt-scale delivery on timelines that conventional approaches simply cannot match,” Suh said in a statement.

Young-kyu Ahn, EVP and chief technology officer at SHI, said floating data centers represent “a new business model that extends shipbuilding capabilities into the digital infrastructure sector.”

“Combined with eco-friendly energy solutions, [floating data centers] will set new standards in the global data market and serve as a key driver of future growth,” he added in a statement.

‘Speed to power is the new moat’

In his LinkedIn post, Suh said “Speed to power is the new moat.”

“We’ve thoughtfully partnered with some of the leading global conglomerates, institutional infrastructure investors, and power generators allowing us to deliver over 1,500 MW of capacity over the next 3 years,” he added. “If you’re working on AI compute, power, or data center infrastructure—let’s talk.”

The partners said that with their floating data center approach, they intend to unlock stranded generation capacity “beyond the reach of conventional land-based sites.”

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