China activates pioneering underwater data centre in Hainan submerging massive 1,433-ton data cable on the seabed to utilise the ocean’s natural cooling properties.
This revolutionary step has a major advantage of a drastic reduction in energy consumption.
Traditional land-based data centres need extensive amounts of electricity for cooling systems to prevent servers from overheating.
Experts placed the cabin 35 meters underwater utilising the cold seawater as a natural and free coolant.
Explaining the procedure, project manager at Shenzhen HiCloud Data Centre Technology, Pu Ding, stated: “We put the entire data cabin in the deep sea because seawater can help cool down the temperature.”
He affirmed that this procedure is much more energy saving in the cooling process hence reducing the operation expenses.
Each submerged cabin has 24 server racks, which can support up to 500 servers to support multiple types of digital services, such as AI computing or travel apps.
This project is a cornerstone of Hainan’s strategy to develop its “blue economy” and become a technologic and maritime innovation hub. The provincial plan is a vision of the 100 such underwater cabins network.
The project is considered as a transition into commercial implementation of the experiment, which is why it stands out compared to its predecessors such as the Project Natick conducted by Microsoft.
Although it is still unclear how this underwater data center will affect the environment in the long term and whether it is scalable, its successful launch makes it a revolutionary approach to green data infrastructure in an attempt to sustain the astronomical energy demands of the AI age.
