A 24-megawatt datacenter is the pilot project for a new approach to AI infrastructure. Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology
China has been working toward undersea AI data centers for some time to mitigate the costs (and pollution) associated with cooling. Now, it has begun operating a wind-powered data center off the coast of Shanghai. It will eventually scale up to a 24-megawatt energy draw, which could itself be a pilot project for multi-hundred-megawatt successors.
Shanghai Hailanyun Technology is operating the project, but China has expressed an overall wish for data center companies to explore the sea as a heatsink. Multiple approaches have been taken, including creating floating data center vessels and pumping seawater through the server rooms, but this new Shanghai install…
A 24-megawatt datacenter is the pilot project for a new approach to AI infrastructure. Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology
China has been working toward undersea AI data centers for some time to mitigate the costs (and pollution) associated with cooling. Now, it has begun operating a wind-powered data center off the coast of Shanghai. It will eventually scale up to a 24-megawatt energy draw, which could itself be a pilot project for multi-hundred-megawatt successors.
Shanghai Hailanyun Technology is operating the project, but China has expressed an overall wish for data center companies to explore the sea as a heatsink. Multiple approaches have been taken, including creating floating data center vessels and pumping seawater through the server rooms, but this new Shanghai installation actually submerses the servers in water-tight pods.
This makes operation and maintenance much more difficult, but maximizes the ocean’s usefulness for heat dissipation. The project aims to draw essentially all of its eventual electrical power from offshore wind installations, giving the whole project a near-zero overall footprint. It’s also a use for offshore wind power, making use of the electricity closer to its actual source of generation.
24 megawatts isn’t much, but the operator plans to scale the idea up with future data centers drawing as much as 500 megawatts. That’s a fair bit larger than Microsoft’s Natick pilot project, and competitive with some of the largest plans from anywhere in the world.
Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology
China requires that a data center use no more than 1.25 times as much energy as it uses on the IT components that actually do the work, which doesn’t leave a ton left over for cooling. On this “power usage efficiency” (PUE) scale, a score of 1.0 means that all input power goes to useful work, while this data center should achieve a PUE of around 1.15.
A pretty intuitive worry is worth addressing, though: heating the oceans. At first, it seems like a frivolous concern, given the almost unimaginable volume of the world’s oceans. The problem is that this skepticism then runs directly into the equally unimaginable scale of proposed future data center projects.
In all likelihood, no data future will meaningfully warm entire oceans, but local seas could absolutely be warmed to problematic extents for local biodiversity. One early Chinese project found that even small installations could make about a one-degree impact on the immediately surrounding water. With some dreamed-of data center projects requiring up to a terawatt of power, it could be much, much more impactful.
A 2024 study also found that underwater speaker systems could create sound waves intense enough to damage equipment. This is a meaningful danger as AI companies become more central to national economies and militaries and could potentially become targets for nation-state foolishness.