China has finished construction of what’s being billed as the world’s first wind-powered underwater data center (UDC), located off the coast of the Lin-gang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone. The project, which cost around ¥1.6 billion (US$226 million), marks a bold step in sustainable, high-performance computing infrastructure.
The ambitious project combines offshore wind power, which supplies more than 95% of the facility’s electricity, with a naturally cooled seabed environment to cut energy and land use. Compared with traditional terrestrial data centers, the underwater project is designed to reduce total power consumption by an estimated 22.8%, as well as eliminate the use of fresh water and reduce land use by more than 90%.
As we're all very aware of now, data centers need a whole lot of cooling to function. Large centers can consume up to five million gallons of water each day – around what a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people might use daily. OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, is planning to mitigate this water use with a closed-loop system that recycles an initial million gallons with expected top-ups of 12,000 gallons per year, according to Oracle's new co-CEO Clay Magouyrk, speaking at the the company's CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas in September.
Cooling is one of the biggest energy drains for these new tech hubs, typically accounting for 40-50% of total power use. By accessing seawater as a natural cooling system, the Lin-gang Special Area facility is expected to cut that down to below 10%. Phase one has now been completed and is designed to achieve a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of no higher than 1.15. (China’s national guidelines require new or retrofitted large-scale data centers to stay below 1.25 by the end of 2025.)
The center is expected to support a wide range of advanced digital-economy and computing applications, rather than simply serving as data storage. According to official sources, the facility will power artificial-intelligence workloads and high-end model training, provide computing infrastructure for 5G networks, the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and e-commerce, and serve as part of the region’s backbone for international data flows. Essentially, this UDC will function as a green, high-performance underwater computing cluster.
It's worth noting that this project is just Phase 1 of the mammoth underwater build. This 2.3-MW demonstration facility will be scaled up in Phase 2 to reach 24 MW capacity, though no timeline for its launch has been announced yet.
Earlier this year, China launched another UDC off the coast of Lingshui Li in Hainan Province, which became the world’s first commercial underwater data center (as opposed to Microsoft's test UDC off the coast of Scotland). The Lin-gang Special Area build, about 47 miles (75 km) southeast of central Shanghai, is the first to employ offshore wind power generation, combining renewable energy with subsea cooling on such a large commercial scale.
However, the technology remains in its early stages, with engineers acknowledging that the jump from this demonstration facility to full-scale operations will still require ongoing work and improvement. Things that will be of interest to those involved in the Lin-gang Special Area prototype include potential maintenance costs, corrosion and impact on the marine environment.
"Construction of UDCs is still in its initial stage," said Wang Shifeng, chairman of China Communications Construction Company's Third Harbor Engineering. "To achieve the transition from demonstration projects to large-scale application, progress is still required in terms of technological maturity and cost optimization."
In March, the Shanghai municipal government announced its intention to scale up its intelligent computing cloud industry by more than ¥200 billion by 2027, with a targeted computing capacity of 200 EFLOPS.
Source: Xinhua
