Eric Kim

Eric Kim
Occupation	Chief Technology Officer, Co-Founder of NetworkOcean
Known for	Co-founding NetworkOcean

Eric Kim is an American entrepreneur and technologist who is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of NetworkOcean, a company that designs and operates underwater data centers. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch and is based in San Francisco, California.

Career

Kim co-founded NetworkOcean alongside Sam Mendel; the two met in high school. According to Crunchbase, Kim has a background in physics, computer science, machine learning, and renewable energy. As CTO, he oversees the technical development of the company's underwater data center systems.

NetworkOcean builds and operates data center infrastructure that is submerged in ocean water. The company's core premise is that seawater cooling can reduce power usage by up to 40 percent compared to conventional land-based data centers while eliminating freshwater consumption for cooling purposes. The company offers two primary products: floating data center barges, which are scalable to over 200 megawatts of capacity, and underwater data center capsules designed for industry-leading free cooling performance. NetworkOcean claims a deployment time of approximately four months.

The company launched out of Y Combinator on August 15, 2024, announcing plans to submerge a small capsule filled with GPU servers into San Francisco Bay. Kim and Mendel have argued that moving data centers off land could help slow ocean temperature rise by drawing less power overall and using seawater as a natural coolant for the capsule's shell. They have also suggested that a bay location would offer low-latency processing speeds for the San Francisco Bay Area's artificial intelligence industry.

The project has attracted scrutiny from environmental scientists and regulatory agencies. A Wired report noted that scientists studying the San Francisco Bay raised concerns that even minor heat output or physical disturbance from underwater data center equipment could trigger toxic algae blooms and harm marine wildlife. The report also indicated that NetworkOcean had pursued initial testing without having obtained certain permits from California and federal agencies overseeing the bay.

NetworkOcean operates in several overlapping sectors, including artificial intelligence infrastructure, hard tech, hardware, cloud computing, and climate technology.