China's first wind-powered underwater data center goes live

A good seven months after completing the first phase of an ambitious project, Chinese engineers have officially launched the world's first underwater data center powered directly by offshore wind turbines. The innovative technology complex, located on the seabed off the coast of Shanghai in the Lin-hang Special Zone, began operating at the end of May. The project offers huge advantages over land-based facilities, as it does not require any fresh water to operate and reduces the need for valuable land use by more than 90 percent.

The center was built by a subsidiary of China Communications Construction. The underwater structure uses the surrounding oceanographic environment as a natural heat sink, which is removed from the systems via a closed cooling circuit. Traditional centers on land most often rely on fresh water due to its lower content of salts, minerals and biological impurities, as it does not cause corrosion of the pipes and maintains high cooling efficiency. The Chinese underwater center solves these challenges with a special closed system of copper pipe heat exchangers, which reduces electricity consumption by 22.8 percent. In addition, offshore wind farms generate as much as 95 percent of all the electricity that the facility needs to operate its 192 server cabinets, spread over four floors.

Professor Li Zhen of Tsinghua University explained to the media that the electricity consumption for cooling in such an underwater environment accounts for only one-tenth of the total energy consumption of the entire center. If the systems on this scale were moved underwater, the energy consumption for cooling would be reduced to about 30 billion kW, which would save about 50 billion kWh of electricity annually.

The center currently operates at 2.3 MW, but the planned final capacity is as much as 24 MW, which would be enough to supply 20,000 households. This large reserve allows for uninterrupted hardware upgrades and expansion of computing capacity in the future. Despite the obvious advantages, underwater computing on a commercial scale remains unknown.

Questions remain about the durability of the equipment and the ecological impact of constantly emitting heat into the local marine environment. While some tech companies are already considering moving data to space due to growing demand, this Chinese project will serve as a key test in the age of artificial intelligence.