Most people don’t think about the part of America’s critical infrastructure that lies hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean. This part carries internet traffic, oil, natural gas, and electricity across thousands of miles of ocean floor. Cables and pipes under the water. Buildings in ports. Platforms in the ocean. For long periods of time, most of it is not watched over. It is only checked when a ship can get out there, the weather is good, and a crew is available. That is a quite long list of conditions.
That’s one reason why Poseidon’s Forge, a small company that works with defense and ocean technology, has been getting steady but quiet attention since it showed off its DarkWake autonomous underwater vehicle earlier this year. When the company first came out at Oceanology International in March 2026, it wasn’t met with the polite applause that most niche hardware releases get. In the AUV community, people seemed to really lean in.
Poseidon’s Forge calls the DarkWake’s design a “open payload architecture.” This means that the vehicle’s core stays the same, but operators can change the mission kits inside it based on their needs. Sonar imaging, advanced navigation, environmental sensing, camera kits, and avoiding obstacles. It only takes hours instead of weeks to rearrange the vehicle, which might not seem like a big deal until you consider how much time and money the industry wastes now trying to move equipment from one job to another. It’s like having one truck that can be turned into a flatbed, a tanker, or a crane rig by attaching different parts. When you think about it that way, the numbers change.
It is important to think about what this means for monitoring infrastructure in particular. The undersea cable network in the United States alone is worth hundreds of billions of dollars and is used for communication. It is not always surveyed. Inspection of pipelines offshore is expensive and often depends on calm seas and big support ships on the surface. Not only does bad weather slow down inspections, it stops them all together. Once it’s set up, the DarkWake doesn’t care much about the surface conditions because it can run on its own for 12 to 30 hours or more, depending on its configuration.
The software stack that runs on top of the hardware is also interesting. Forge from Poseidon created what it calls the “Forge software ecosystem.” This ecosystem includes Helios for vehicle control and autonomy, Orion for mission planning, M4P for multi-vehicle mesh networking, and Forge Base Cloud for data management and analytics. That last bit is more important than it seems at first. If a vehicle can gather useful information but not send it back to those who make decisions quickly enough, it is only half useful. From what I can tell, DarkWake was made from the start to treat data as the mission itself, not something you deal with after recovery.
Poseidon’s Forge’s founder and CEO, Daryl Slocum, made it clear at the launch: the goal was to make things less complicated while still letting operators adapt to changing mission needs. At first, it might sound like a press release, but the architecture backs it up. The flooded vehicle design makes the mechanics simpler. The company says that the integrated solid-state battery option is the first of its kind not to be housed in a pressure-tolerant housing in an AUV. It increases the amount of energy available without the safety issues that come with regular marine battery systems.
It’s still not clear how fast the company can increase production or how well the vehicle works in the different depths and conditions it’s meant for. There are real questions there, and the AUV market has seen good ideas fail in the manufacturing stage before. But the DarkWake’s reception makes it seem like this isn’t just another hardware startup trying to get defense contracts. The multi-vehicle mesh networking feature, which lets fleets of DarkWake units work together and talk to each other without any help during a mission, points to a future where one operator controls a coordinated swarm of vehicles that cover areas that would take a crewed ship days to explore.
It’s not getting easier to take care of America’s underwater infrastructure. It’s actually getting bigger, with more offshore wind farms, subsea cables, platform structures, and pipelines in waters that are farther away. That hole between what needs to be watched and what is watched isn’t getting smaller by itself. It’s likely that the DarkWake isn’t the only way to fill that gap. But it’s hard not to notice that this one makes more sense than the last few.
