While the tech giants of the world hunger for energy to power their massive data centers, one Chinese company is pushing a solution that would make Jacques Cousteau’s eyes light up: an underwater data center, powered by wind.
This week, Chinese firm HiCloud broke the mold by launching the first phase of the 24 megawatt facility off the coast of Shanghai, claiming a world first. According to New Atlas, 95 percent of the data center’s energy comes from offshore wind, while the facility itself is cooled by the cold ocean current.
All in all, it took $226 million to put together, and is estimated to cut total power consumption by around 23 percent, compared to traditional land-based data centers.
The news comes not even a month after HiCloud completed China’s first commercial undersea data center, located 114ft below the coastal water of Hainan. That project, South China Morning Post reported, is essentially a series of submarine server racks, made up of cabin-pods capable of hosting 400 to 500 servers a pop.
Each cabin is then chained together to form the “data center,” which is linked to the mainland via an undersea telecomm cable. Under China’s “Eastern Data, Western Computing” strategy, the local government is seeking to expand the data center into a network some 100 cabins strong.
The world’s first underwater data center went live in 2015, as part of a two-phase pilot program called Project Natick, carried out by Microsoft. As of June 2024, Microsoft confirmed the project had been abandoned.
“While we don’t currently have data centers in the water, we will continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts around data center reliability and sustainability, for example with liquid immersion,” a spokesperson told industry publication Data Center Dynamics.
In other words, China might not have been first, but it’s the only country right now racing ahead with not one, but two underwater data centers in progress. The experiment sets up intriguing stakes: whether it can succeed in the depths where Microsoft barely made a splash.
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