Building nuclear data centers at sea Co-founder & CEO of Atomarine (YC S26)
San Francisco
Joined October 2025
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Dimitris K retweeted
Named first in YC’s hottest starups by @TechCrunch
techcrunch.com/2026/09/13/th…
Named first in YC’s hottest starups by @TechCrunch
techcrunch.com/2026/09/13/th…
Great to be featured in @theinnovator!
Boston-based @Atomarine_co is developing nuclear-powered #datacenters at sea. The approach is being touted as an alternative to land-based data centers, which are facing mounting opposition."We move compute offshore,” says CEO Dimitris Koutentak
theinnovator.news/startup-of…
Our floating data center has moved on shore for the @ycombinator demo day. Stop by to see how we we’ve been selling compute from sea for a whole month!
Great to be featured in the list of the most ambitious startups of this batch at @ycombinator!
Demo Day of @ycombinator S26 batch is next week.
A sneak peek at what founders are building:
Floating data centers.
Diamond semiconductors.
Biological computers.
It isn’t how much AI is in it. By now, that’s almost expected.
Big question: What becomes possible because AI now exists?
My latest for @Forbes 👇
forbes.com/sites/dariashunin…
We’ll need a lot of alternative data center deployments. @PhilipJohnston is leading in space, we are going in the ocean.
Starcloud's @PhilipJohnston on alternative places to put data centers, like in the ocean or another country.
"The one that came out recently—there's a company in the current YC batch called Atomarine. And they're basically barges which they can put in international waters and run nuclear power stations on."
"That one, I actually quite like the idea of. Because the problem with all the others is, do you get almost unlimited low cost energy? And the answer is almost no."
"Now Atomarine also doesn't get unlimited low cost energy. But the big constraint of building nuclear on land is permitting."
"And so if they can at least solve that component of it by building them out to sea, then they can get down to like $0.08 or $0.09 per kilowatt hour."
"We're going to be in the end state much less than half a cent per kilowatt hour, including the launch cost. So I'm not worried about it competing with us. But that will definitely compete with building more terrestrial data centers."
No one wants data centers near them, we can put them in the 70% of the planet where humans aren't
politico.com/news/2026/08/26…
At @Atomarine_co we are building exactly this: standalone power generation for datacenters placed far from communities. The result is cheaper energy, less resource competition on shore and less impact on communities.
With centralized manufacturing and deployment at sea, @Atomarine_co can build the largest deployments far away from on-shore scarce resources.
It's time to build mega data centers. In counties where they're already operational, the picture is uniformly better since 2024:
- More housing
- Higher home values
- Less unemployment
- More job growth
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
This is why @Atomarine_co is building standalone offshore data centers powered by nuclear.
✔️Data centers do not take water needed by local communities - they use abundant seawater,
✔️They do not take power needed by the Texas power grid - they generate it on site,
✔️They lower the cost of electricity on shore
✔️They must not disrupt neighborhoods or rural communities - they sit far away from neighborhoods and have zero emissions.
My directive has halted up to 1,800 data center projects.
I established guidelines & guardrails to protect Texas communities:
✔️Data centers must not take water needed by local communities,
✔️They must not take power needed by the Texas power grid,
✔️They must lower the cost of electricity,
✔️They must not disrupt neighborhoods or rural communities.
These guidelines are now the universally applied standard in Texas.
thecentersquare.com/texas/ar… via @thecentersquare
Meeting the demand for compute is becoming impossible.
At Atomarine we are building the next generation of AI infrastructure: the most scalable, cheapest and most climate friendly form of standalone compute on Earth.
People ask us how are we keeping our data centers protected. With these guys we don’t even have to think about it.
AIR DEFENSE AS A SERVICE.
In March, drones took three AWS data centers offline in the Middle East and a dozen core cloud services with them. Amazon lost 200 million USD in one day.
We build the box that stops it.
Containerized cells of autonomous interceptors, parked next to anything you need to keep running. It detects the drone, launches, and physically removes it. Not jamming.
A Patriot missile costs over 1m USD to kill a 30k USD drone. That math never scaled to civilian sites. Ours does.
Introducing @impactdrones, @ycombinator S26. Air defense as a service for critical civilian infrastructure.
Highly excited for this. An amazing team with very promising tech at the forefront of the new nuclear revolution!
We’ve been working on offshore energy for data centers for more than a year. Two months ago, we pitched @ycombinator the idea.
The vision must have resonated: YC just published the same exact idea as an RFS.
ycombinator.com/rfs#compute-…
It’s not every day you get this kind of praise from one of the biggest disruptors. Thank you Philip, now back to building 🚀
Aight im calling @YCombinator S26 early… the most oversubscribed company in the batch will surely be Dimitris and Emile, two @MIT nuclear engineers building Atomarine 🔥
I’ve seen a bunch of ocean based data center concepts recently and this one makes the most sense to me. Not that it will be cheaper than in space in the long run (sorry lads!), but if we wanna build gigawatts terrestrially at any point, this seems like the best option 👌
@_dkout @Atomarine_co
Earlier this summer @sama came to speak at
@ycombinator.
He validated our entire business thesis: @OpenAI will need insane amounts of compute and at @Atomarine_co we're building the most scalable system for clean compute that can deploy anywhere on Earth 4x faster than onshore.
Data centers cannot reach the scale they need on land. Grid interconnection queues are reaching a decade, resource competition burdens local communities, and project development is a very non-repeatable task.
We're building nuclear-powered, floating data centers: standalone power and compute, deployable anywhere, 4x faster than building on land.
Introducing @Atomarine_co (@ycombinator S26).
This is why at @Atomarine_co we're moving data centers away from communities into stand alone projects at sea.
Data centers haven’t been raising residential bills.
The sharpest increases are found in states that have pursued the country’s most aggressive climate policies, not those with the most data centers.
California, with some of the nation’s fastest-rising electricity rates, has seen relatively modest data-center growth. Virginia, where data centers consume more than a fifth of the state’s electricity, has experienced price increases near the national average.
@Shawn_Regan in the City Journal Substack: cityjournal.substack.com/p/d…
