World's first underwater datacentre starts operations in China, it runs on wind power

China now has a datacentre underwater. The new underwater datacentre is located just off the coast of Shanghai and runs on wind energy. The Chinese government says that this datacentre is far more efficient and consumes almost no water compared to traditional land-based datacentres.

In Short

• China builds world’s first underwater datacentre
• It runs almost entirely on wind energy
• China says it consumes almost no water compared to land-based datacentres

Datacentres are becoming increasingly important as demand for AI continues to grow. But there is a problem. Datacentres consume a lot of energy and resources, and they need a lot of space. While tech leaders like Elon Musk have often talked about building datacentres in space or underwater, China has beaten them to it. The world’s first underwater datacentre has already started operations near Shanghai, and it runs on wind power.

The datacentre in question is the Shanghai Lingang Undersea Datacentre Demonstration Project. The facility is located near Lingang, a high-tech free-trade zone in eastern Shanghai that is also home to a Tesla Gigafactory, and sits 10 metres below the surface. It began operations in May as a joint project between HiCloud Technology, also known as Shanghai Hailanyun Technology, and state-owned China Communications Construction Company. The datacentre has a capacity of 24 megawatts.

The Lingang Undersea Datacentre Demonstration Project was completed in October last year. At the time, the Chinese government stated that building the datacentre cost roughly $225 million.

China says underwater datacentre takes less power, water to cool

Chinese authorities claim that this underwater datacentre consumes 22 per cent less power than traditional land-based datacentres. And it runs on 95 per cent green energy, courtesy of a nearby offshore wind farm.

A major problem for datacentres globally has been water consumption. Servers in these centres can get hot as they process information, and thus, require clean water for cooling. Globally, this has raised concerns over datacentres increasing demand for clean water and stressing local resources. However, China says that their underwater datacentre uses over 90 per cent less water than those located on land.

But how? You see that when a datacentre is submerged in the ocean, it gets a natural cooling effect, thanks to the water around it. And this effect helps in reducing power and water needs.

These gains are crucial for the future of datacentres. As per the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, the water footprint of datacentres could reach 9.3 trillion litres by 2030, which it said would be enough to meet the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion residents of sub-Saharan Africa.

However, underwater datacentres have raised environmental questions. Reports indicate that some fear that the Shanghai project could have risks such as disturbing seabed sediments and causing localised warming in seawater.

China beats west to the punch

Keep in mind that this datacentre is more of a demonstration facility and proof-of-concept project rather than a major addition to national computing capacity. The 24-megawatt size is far below the gigawatt-scale facilities being developed elsewhere to serve growing AI demand.

And HiCloud has been working on underwater datacentres for years now. In 2023, it launched the first commercial underwater datacentre in Hainan, in southern China. But the Shanghai project is the first such facility to run on offshore wind power.

While China is not the first country to test underwater datacentres, it is the first to run one commercially. Microsoft launched a pilot project in waters around Orkney in Scotland in 2018, and reported encouraging results two years later. But the project seems to have slowed down since.

But the US is planning to catch up. Recently, Ocean startup Panthalassa secured a $140 million from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and is developing floating, wave-powered datacentre ‘nodes’ that would stay mostly underwater, use seawater for cooling and send data back through satellite links.

On the other hand, Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning to make datacentres in space. India too, is exploring something similar. Sarvam has partnered with Pixxel on making India’s first orbital datacentre, with plans for a 200 kg-class satellite carrying datacentre-class GPUs to train and run India-built AI models in orbit using Pixxel’s Earth imagery.

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