Prudhoe Bay Data Center, Prudhoe Bay, Alaska

Far North Digital, LLC is promoting the Prudhoe Bay Data Center, a proposed modular co-location data center at Prudhoe Bay, in Alaska's North Slope Borough, that would run on the oil field's stranded natural gas. The company says it would start with a 120-megawatt power plant, built to tier 3 to 4 standards, with room to expand later.

The pitch rests on gas that has nowhere else to go. Alaska Gasline Development Corp. authors, quoted on the company's own site, wrote that more than 8 billion cubic feet of gas produced daily at Prudhoe Bay must be reinjected into the ground for lack of a way to ship it to market. Far North Digital says the site could generate enough electricity to power New York City for more than 90 days.

Far North Digital says it would generate power with fuel cells and carbon capture, and would use the Arctic cold to cut cooling energy by 40 to 60 percent, according to the company and a University of Alaska Fairbanks energy center blog. The blog says the project depends on fiber cable connections to Tokyo and Ireland that are still being developed.

Far North Digital has not named a construction timeline, a customer, a cost estimate or a permit filing for the Prudhoe Bay site. A separate company, Stak Energy, is pursuing its own, much larger gas-fired data center campus about 35 kilometers away on state land; that project has its own page on this site.