One out of many things that I credit Google for is thinking outside the box. Nothing demonstrates that more than a story coming out of the UK today. Apparently, Google is considering launching their own “computer navy”. “Data barges” that are anchored offshore.

Google has datacenters all throughout the world. Google is historically fairly quiet about exactly how many datacenters they have and where they are located. Google believes that keeping these things under the radar gives them a competitive advantage. Google goes so far as to seek building permits for datacenters under different limited liability corporations with different names – this way the center doesn’t have a “Google” name attached to it.

According to a story on Techcrunch, Google has 36 datacenters – 19 in the U.S., 12 in Europe, 3 in Asia and one in Russia and one in South America.

The latest story is that Google is looking to go to sea. The plan is to launch sea-based data centers that are environmentally friendly and free of land-based regulation and property taxes. The data centers would use sea water for cooling purposes and the motion of the waves for power.

This would definitely be a radical new way of powering and cooling a datacenter. Typically, a datacenter is a colossal collection of heat-producing computer hardware and is anything but green. The carbon footprint of the servers running the Internet are predicted by one firm to equal that of the airline industry in 2020.

The big question: Would a hurricane then have the capacity to take out Google?