New Delhi: Data centres are known to release large amounts of heat, and China has begun using a new cooling mechanism—the ocean itself.
The state news agency China Daily reported on 1 June that China has begun operating the world’s first undersea data centre powered by offshore winds. The Shanghai Lingang data centre was built by Shanghai Hailanyun Technology and a subsidiary of China Communications Construction, a majority state-owned engineering and construction conglomerate, to meet the country’s growing AI demand in a greener manner.
Conventional data centers typically use about one-third of their total electricity consumption on cooling systems, according to Tsinghua University professor Li Zhen.
“For an undersea data center of the same scale, the electricity used for cooling would only account for about one-tenth of total power consumption,” he told China Daily. “If data centers of the same scale were placed underwater, even allowing extra margins, cooling consumption could fall to around 30-billion kW. That would save about 50 billion kWh of electricity each year.”
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An engineering breakthrough
The project is located nearly 10 km off the coast of Shanghai’s Lingang area. It has a capacity of 24 megawatts which could power nearly 20,000 houses.
The key innovation in the project is what developers call a “direct offshore wind connection” model. Instead of being plugged into an electric grid, the data centre directly draws power from offshore wind farms. The electricity is transmitted to the data modules through cables that run under the sea and bypass the traditional electrical grid system.
Being located undersea also means it can capitalise on the ocean’s cooling ability. Most data centres consume a lot of fresh water, not because they need it to function, but because it remains the simplest cooling mechanism available—it lacks salts, minerals, and biological impurities.
The underwater data centre transfers heat directly into the ocean instead. Sea water is circulated through a sealed copper-pipe heat exchange system which carries the heat from servers into the ocean.
However, while such technology could help reduce a data centre’s demand for water and electricity, the effects of releasing heat into marine environments is unclear.
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Not a new experiment
This is not the first time such technology has been explored. In 2018, Microsoft’s Project Natick tried something similar. It deployed the Northern Isles datacentre 117 feet deep into the sea floor and for the next two years the team tested and monitored the reliability of servers.
Microsoft found that if eight in 100 servers fail on land, only 1 in 100 failed in the ocean. Yet, the tech company decided to never scale up the project.
US data centres consumed over 17 billion gallons of fresh water in 2023 according to the Pew Research Centre. By 2028, large facilities alone are expected to consume anywhere between 16 to 33 billion gallons.
Even as the race to build data centres continues, building them in the ocean is still an experiment.