Are China's Wind-Powered Underwater Data Centres the Future?

China has launched the world’s first commercial underwater data centre, a development in sustainable digital infrastructure located in Lingshui County, Hainan Province.

This project merges renewable energy with digital innovation and is part of China's strategy to grow its blue economy. The servers are housed in a 1,300-tonne underwater data cabin positioned 35 metres below the sea's surface.

Each cabin is designed to hold 24 server racks that can accommodate between 400 and 500 servers.

The submersion of the data cabin provides efficiency improvements. Project Manager Pu Ding from Shenzhen HiCloud Data Centre Technology explains the primary benefit of the underwater location.

“We put the entire data cabin in the deep sea because seawater can help cool down the temperature. Compared to their land-based counterparts, underwater data centres can reduce the energy consumption needed for cooling, helping to lower operational costs,” Pu explains.

Hainan’s 14th Five-Year Plan outlines an expansion to 100 underwater data cabins as part of a new industrial estate for marine economy technologies.

Renewable energy and power usage effectiveness

A second underwater data centre has now been completed in the Lin-gang Special Area of Shanghai’s Pilot Free Trade Zone. This US$226m project is described as the world's first wind-powered underwater data centre.

According to the project's details, it draws 95% of its electricity from offshore wind farms and uses the cool seabed environment for natural heat dissipation. The design could reduce total power consumption by 22.8%, eliminate freshwater use and cut land occupation by over 90%.

The initial construction phase has recorded a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of no higher than 1.15.

This figure is below China’s national target of 1.25 for large-scale facilities by 2025.

Data centres are known for their high energy consumption, particularly for cooling systems and large facilities can use up to 5 million gallons of water daily.

Strategic context and international precedents

The growth in cloud computing and generative AI is increasing global demand for high-performance data infrastructure.

China’s pilot programme that allows foreign ownership of data centres and value-added telecoms services in Hainan, Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen could attract multinational technology companies.

The Lin-gang project is also intended to support AI workloads, 5G infrastructure, industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications and e-commerce platforms.

This initiative follows previous experiments with underwater data centre technology.

In 2014, Microsoft initiated Project Natick, which involved submerging an 855-server prototype off the coast of Scotland in 2018. After a two-year testing period, Microsoft concluded the project in 2024 without moving to commercial deployment.

China’s model is progressing from a demonstration to a full-scale operation. The Lin-gang project has a current capacity of 2.3 megawatts with a second phase planned to reach 24 megawatts. Future projects are targeting up to 500 megawatts of offshore wind-powered capacity.

Environmental design and future challenges

The facility is powered almost entirely by offshore wind turbines, using one of China’s renewable energy sources.

Huang Dinan, President of Shenergy Group, a key contractor on the project, says that the East China Sea offers over 3,000 hours of annual wind utilisation, making it a suitable location for hybrid wind-digital infrastructure.

By removing the need for land-based cooling towers, air conditioning and freshwater, the project's ecological footprint could be reduced.

The project also presents new research opportunities in marine engineering, corrosion resistance and biodiversity impact assessment.

It supports Shanghai's goal of becoming a global hub for scientific and technological innovation, which is linked to the growth of its cloud computing industry, projected to be worth over US$28bn by 2027.

This initiative also aligns with China’s East Data West Computing programme, launched in 2022 to build data centres in western provinces to process data from more developed eastern regions.

The long-term viability of the technology will depend on addressing several key factors, including:

• Maintenance and reliability to ensure subsea servers can be repaired and upgraded efficiently.
• Marine ecosystem management involves the study and mitigation of any impact on local biodiversity.
• Cost and scalability to create efficiencies that make underwater data centres commercially competitive with conventional facilities.