Content |
History
2025
Launch of the world's first underwater wind-powered data center
At the end of October 2025, the construction of the world's first underwater data center (DPC), which operates on wind energy, was completed in China. The facility is located in the waters of the pilot free trade zone of the Linggang Special District in Shanghai. The project was implemented by Shanghai Hailanyun Technology, also known as HiCloud.
The project cost amounted to approximately $226 million. The power supply of the data center is 95% provided by offshore wind power. At the same time, compared to traditional ground-based data centers, the underwater site provides a reduction in energy consumption by 22.8%, which is achieved due to the naturally cooled environment of the seabed. In conventional data centers, cooling can account for up to 40-50% of the total power consumption. In an underwater data center, this figure can be reduced to about 10%. In addition, the consumption of fresh water is completely eliminated, and the need for land is reduced by more than 90%.
World's
The energy efficiency ratio (PUE) of the new facility is less than 1.15. For comparison, in China, the national target for the sustainability of data centers as of 2025 is set at 1.25. The smaller the PUE value, the more efficiently the data center uses power.
The total capacity of the underwater site is 24 MW. The center is expected to support a wide range of workloads rather than simply serving as a data store. The object, in particular, is planned to be used for artificial intelligence tasks, including training large language models. In addition, the data center will provide computing infrastructure for 5G networks, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and e-commerce, and will also become part of the regional backbone network for international data flows. In general, the site will function as an environmentally friendly high-performance underwater computing cluster.[1]
Launch of the world's first underwater commercial data center
In early October 2025, the Chinese company Shenzhen HiCloud Data Center Technology (a division of Highlander) commissioned the world's first underwater commercial data center (DPC). The facility is located in the Hainan Island region of southeastern China.
According to the South China Morning Post, computing equipment is mounted inside special underwater modules weighing 1,300 tons. Each of them contains 24 racks, which can accommodate from 400 to 500 servers. The modules themselves are located at a depth of 35 meters.
Compared to traditional ground data centers, underwater facilities can significantly reduce operating costs. Seawater is used to remove heat from equipment: this, it is claimed, makes it possible to reduce cooling costs by about 90% compared to traditional data centers. In addition, 95% of the energy consumed in the underwater data center will be covered by renewable sources, which will further reduce the carbon footprint.
As part of the Shenzhen HiCloud Data Center Technology project, special precautions had to be implemented. In particular, underwater modules are covered with special glass "scales" to protect against corrosion. The object has a surface part, which serves as an access point for maintenance personnel.
Although the placement of data centers under water opens up new opportunities in terms of reducing their energy consumption, some experts are concerned about the possible consequences of rising ocean temperatures due to constant heat generation. Such thermal pollution can become a serious problem in the case of mass construction of underwater data centers of high capacity, amounting to hundreds of megawatts and gigawatts.[2]
Construction of a data center under water
In mid-February 2025, China announced the construction 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.[3]
Notes
| The site content is translated by machine translation software powered by PROMT. The machine-translated articles are not always perfect and may contain errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. Read original article If you find inaccuracies or errors in the results of machine translation, please write to editor@tadviser.ru. We will make every effort to correct them as soon as possible. |