HiCloud

History

2025: Launch

In mid-February 2025, China completed the modernization of the world's first commercial underwater data center (DPC). The facility is located on the seabed in Lingshui in Hainan province in the south of China, and its operator is HiCloud, a division of Highlander.

The data center is based on special cylindrical capsules 18 meters long and 3.6 meters in diameter: such containers hold more than 400 high-performance servers. The computing power of the data center as of February 2025 is equivalent to about 30 thousand advanced gaming computers. In one second, the system is capable of performing a volume of calculations that would take an average PC a whole year. For example, a data center can process up to 7,000 requests per second when working with the DeepSeek AI model. The resources of the data center are planned to be used to train models of artificial intelligence, scientific research and other tasks.

The facility uses seawater as a natural refrigerant. Thanks to this, a high level of energy efficiency and savings in fresh water are achieved. To install additional modules, there is no need to look for free areas on land. Plus, a high level of physical security is achieved, since the servers are located at a depth of about 35 meters. The capsules have multilayer protection against corrosion and external influences, and the guaranteed service life is at least 25 years.

At the time of the launch of the modernized underwater data center, agreements on the use of its computing power were signed by about 10 companies. Customers intend to use the data center for industrial modeling, game development, AI-inference, implementation of projects in the field of high-performance computing, etc.^[1]

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