China has begun the installation of a data center at a depth of 35 meters that when completed will serve companies such as China Telecom and Hong Kong-based artificial intelligence company SenseTime.
According to China Daily, China will develop an underwater data center. It has begun assembling the process of such a facility off the coast of the city of Sanya on Hainan Island in the south.
China's efforts to build an underwater data center are the result of a public-private venture involving China Offshore Oil Engineering Co. (COOEC), the country's largest Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Installation (EPCI) company in the country, and Highlander, a privately held data center company.
While details of the center's capacity have not been shared, Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater units is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds.
The servers are packed inside a sealed storage unit and together weigh 1.300 tons. The unit is submerged about 35 meters underwater, a process that takes about three hours.
Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such units at the site and create a capacity of nearly six million computers. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat that will naturally be cooled by the sea environment. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt hours of electricity that would otherwise have been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land.
In addition, the facility, which is expected to be operational by 2025, will also save 68.000 square meters of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105.000 tons of fresh water, which would otherwise be used for cooling efforts.
The units are built to last 25 years, but much remains unknown about how the structure will be affected by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in building these centers is limited to the trials it conducted in January 2021 at the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.
In addition to Highlander, Microsoft also tested an underwater data center in 2015 as part of Project Natick off the Pacific coast and then two years of trials at off the coast of Orkney, Scotland in 2020. While the company cited multiple benefits from the approach, it hasn't moved on newer projects in that direction since.
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