China launches commercial underwater data centre off Shanghai, powering AI with seawater cooling
China has placed roughly 2,000 servers on the seabed near Shanghai, creating a commercial underwater data centre that draws power from a nearby offshore wind farm.
A joint venture between HiCloud Technology and China Communications Construction has commissioned a commercial underwater data centre off Shanghai’s coast, deploying about 2,000 servers in the Lingang Special Area. Situated 10 metres underwater and over 10 km from shore, the pod connects directly to an offshore wind farm and consumes 24 MW, relying on seawater for heat removal instead of traditional chillers. The site runs GPU clusters for AI model training, big-data annotation and services for China Telecom and other providers, reporting a power-usage effectiveness of roughly 1.15 and a 22.8% reduction in electricity use compared with land-based equivalents.
The concept mirrors Microsoft’s 2018 Natick trial, which showed a failure rate of 0.7 % underwater versus 5.9 % on land. Researchers note that local temperature rises are modest, but the installation underscores China’s push for green-powered, land-sparing data infrastructure.
Why it matters
It demonstrates a low-energy, land-saving model for AI computing that could lower data-centre environmental impact.
In this story
