A Chinese company has made a significant advancement in data center technology by launching a wind-powered facility underwater. The firm, known as HiCloud, has initiated the first phase of its 24 megawatt data center located off the coast of Shanghai, claiming it to be a world first.
The innovative data center is powered primarily by offshore wind energy, with approximately 95 percent of its electricity sourced from this renewable resource. Additionally, the facility benefits from the cooling effects of the cold ocean currents surrounding it. The total investment in this project reached $226 million, and it is projected to reduce power consumption by around 23 percent compared to conventional land-based data centers.
This recent development follows the completion of China”s first commercial underwater data center, which is situated 114 feet beneath the waters of Hainan. According to reports, this earlier project consists of a series of submarine server racks housed in pod-like cabins that can accommodate between 400 and 500 servers each. These cabins are interconnected to form a cohesive data center, which is linked to the mainland through an undersea telecommunications cable.
Under China”s “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative, local authorities aim to expand this underwater infrastructure into a network comprising around 100 such cabins.
The concept of underwater data centers is not entirely new. The world”s first such facility was launched in 2015 by Microsoft as part of a pilot project called Project Natick. However, as of June 2024, Microsoft announced that it had discontinued this project. A spokesperson indicated that while they no longer operate underwater data centers, they would continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to investigate new concepts regarding data center reliability and sustainability.
Although China was not the pioneer in this domain, it is currently the only nation actively advancing with two underwater data centers, raising questions about the potential success of these facilities where previous efforts have struggled.
