What the heck is Google building on that mysterious giant boat?

CNET published an interesting report on Friday about a mysterious floating structure "four stories high" and "made of modern cargo containers" floating just off the coast of Treasure Island in San Francisco. The investigation suggests the hulking thing is actually a massive data center built to house Google's servers.

Is it really?

A few signs point to yes. The ocean would provide Google with a cheap source of cooling for its servers (water), as well as fuel its electronics with a constant supply of wave-generated energy. Operating in the open ocean could also theoretically allow the company to "operate independent of political goodwill or stability," like a mythical city built on the back of a giant turtle. Except instead of a city it's a search engine.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Oh, and in 2009 Google was granted a patent for a "water-based data center." So there's that.

There are problems with such an endeavor, however, namely in terms of internet connection. John Hewitt at ExtremeTech writes that a wireless link would be possible, but it would be lacking in bandwidth. "Unless the barge is very static and heavily anchored (which somewhat defeats the point of a floating data center), a high-bandwidth submarine cable wouldn't be possible," he adds.

But here's where the story starts getting even more confusing. A similar mystery barge that is also four stories and windowless has since shown up off the coast of Portland, Me. Both are apparently owned by the same company.

A separate report from a CBS affiliate adds another funny wrinkle. According to one insider, Google is actually building a floating marketing center — "a kind of giant Apple store" — exclusively to sell Google Glass. As Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo notes, "If Google is planning to do some Mark Twain-ish Google Glass boat tour, it would make sense to build one on the East Coast, too."

So Google is either building a massive, Pirate Radio-style data center to house its servers, or launching an equally massive marketing campaign designed to sling face computers to coast-dwelling Americans. (Sorry, Kansas?) Until further word from Google, your guess is as good as mine.