China Unveils Underwater Data Centre off Shanghai Coast
China has launched an underwater data centre off the coast of Shanghai, housing approximately 2,000 servers that are cooled by seawater and powered by an offshore wind farm. The facility, which took around 1.6 billion yuan (approximately Rs 2,100 crore) to set up, is a joint effort between HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction.
The design of the underwater data centre borrows from Microsoft's Project Natick, which was shelved in 2020 after the company pulled out its 855 servers from the North Sea. Microsoft had reported that its underwater servers failed at a rate of 0.7%, compared to 5.9% on land.
The Shanghai data centre is currently running GPU clusters for AI training, big data annotation, and work on domestic large language models. Its developers claim that it has achieved a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of around 1.15, resulting in a 22.8% cut in electricity consumption and no water use at all.
The Chinese government states that the project is designed to run on more than 95% green electricity. This underwater data centre is not the first of its kind, as HiCloud Technology had previously set up servers off Hainan in 2021 and began commercial operations there in 2023.