With close to half of the world’s population residing in coastal areas, humans rely on marine environments for food, trade, tourism, recreation, transport and communication activities that are likely to continue to increase. These activities have contributed to extensive negative impacts, such as substantial habitat loss and degradation, collapses of many fish stocks, overall decline in biomass, diversity, and local extinctions. Artificial reefs (ARs) have been deployed all around the world as a mitigation tool of some of these impacts (e.g., habitat restoration), as well as a management tool for recreational fisheries. However, with the expansion of artificial infrastructure and coastal hardening, there is a push to move industry offshore, away from vital and fragile coastal ecosystems. This push leads to the need to examine whether offshore floating marine infrastructure can be employed to create artificial reefs that serve as farms and marine habitats. Here, we explore some of the state-of-the-art knowledge in this area and some of the challenges that these ventures may need to consider and address.