Samsung Heavy Industries and Mousterian Sign Engineering Contract for First Floating AI Data Center in Texas
The companies will engineer 50 MW moored floating data centers for Texas as the state pauses new grid connections for a 474 GW data center backlog.
Overview
Mousterian Corporation and Samsung Heavy Industries have signed an engineering contract to design and build moored floating data centers for deployment in Texas, according to a joint press release. The agreement, executed at a signing ceremony on July 22, 2026, covers the partnership’s first floating data center deployment in the United States and marks the first definitive project agreement under the strategic cooperation framework the two companies announced in April 2026.
What We Know
Under the contract, Mousterian (“M3”) and Samsung Heavy Industries (“SHI”) will jointly perform the basic design, detailed engineering, and production design for purpose-built moored floating data center units, each delivering 50 megawatts of critical IT capacity, according to the press release. The engineering program is meant to establish the technical baseline for a definitive Engineering, Procurement, and Construction contract that the parties intend to execute upon or before the engineering work is finished, and the American Bureau of Shipping is expected to serve as classification society for the project.
The pilot site is expected to sit adjacent to an existing combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in Houston, according to The Register. Each facility uses bulk non-evaporative cooling that consumes no potable water and returns zero process discharge to the surrounding waterway, while supporting high-density, liquid-cooled AI compute, the press release states. The design also eliminates the air-cooled chillers and fans found in conventional data centers, which the companies say gives each facility a lower noise profile for surrounding communities.
Because the units are fabricated in a shipyard, construction can proceed in parallel with sitework rather than after it, according to Techzine. Samsung Heavy Industries is aiming to commission its first operational facility by 2028, The Register and Techzine both reported.
Min Suh, Chief Executive Officer of Mousterian Corporation, said in the press release: “Signing this engineering contract transitions our partnership with Samsung Heavy Industries from intent to execution and gives us a clear path to scaling factory-built critical IT capacity for AI-class facilities. We are jointly engineering the first mission-critical data center of its class to be fabricated off-site to shipyard standards. Because the facility is built in a shipyard, fabrication advances in parallel with sitework rather than after it — a schedule and scale that conventional delivery methods cannot match. And by siting these facilities alongside existing stranded baseload generation and maritime infrastructure, we reach power that land-based development cannot.”
Sung-an Choi, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Samsung Heavy Industries, added: “Floating data centers are a natural extension of the engineering, fabrication, and project delivery capabilities we have built over five decades in offshore and maritime construction. Together with Mousterian, we intend to deliver floating data centers with the same rigor, quality, and schedule certainty that define our maritime track record.”
Mousterian is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and its leadership includes the team behind the world’s first operational floating data center — a barge-mounted facility opened by Nautilus Data Technologies in Stockton, California — according to GCN. Samsung Heavy Industries, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Seongnam, South Korea, is one of the world’s largest shipbuilders and a leader in offshore and maritime engineering, per the press release. Data Center Knowledge reports that other partners in the initiative include Capital Clean Energy Carriers, based in Greece, and Lloyd’s Register.
The announcement lands as Texas moves to slow new data center growth. Texas Governor Greg Abbott this week paused approvals of new data center projects seeking connection to the ERCOT power grid pending an audit, citing interconnection queue requests that regulators estimate at roughly 474 gigawatts — about five times the grid’s peak demand record, according to Utility Dive. Utility Dive reported that data centers account for roughly 90 percent of those pending power requests.
What We Don’t Know
Neither company has disclosed a specific in-service date beyond the 2028 target for Samsung’s first operational facility, and no financial terms of the engineering contract have been made public. It is not yet confirmed how the Texas moratorium on new ERCOT interconnection approvals will affect the timeline for the Houston-area pilot site, since floating facilities sited next to existing power generation may or may not fall under the same review the state has ordered for grid-dependent projects.
Analysis
The deal illustrates a broader industry response to the same power bottleneck driving Texas’s moratorium: rather than compete for scarce grid interconnection capacity, Mousterian and Samsung Heavy Industries are betting that siting data centers next to existing power plants and maritime infrastructure — bypassing new transmission buildout — can compress delivery timelines for AI-scale compute. Other shipbuilders and infrastructure developers have pursued similar concepts; Data Center Knowledge reports that Mitsui O.S.K. Lines partnered with Kinetics in 2025 on what the companies called “the world’s first integrated floating data center platform,” and separately partnered with Hitachi targeting 2027 commercial deployment. Whether the shipyard-fabrication model can scale fast enough to meaningfully ease the interconnection backlog Texas regulators are now auditing remains to be seen.