China launches first wind-powered underwater data centre

One of the growing concerns surrounding data centres amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom is just how much water and energy they consume.

As the information and calculations required by data centre servers become more complex, the facilities need to consume more energy and water to keep the servers cool.

According to an article by Scientific American, approximately 40% of the electricity consumed by an ordinary data center is for this purpose.

To combat this, a new data centre being delivered in China is submerged 10 metres underwater and powered by an offshore windfarm. The administrative committee of the Lin-gang Special Area (Shanghai) says the data centre has a total power capacity of 24 megawatts. It has capacity to hold 396 to 792 AI-capable servers.

Compared to traditional land-based data centres, the project is designed to reduce fresh water use by 100%, and land use by over 90%. It also uses more than 95% renewable electricity and reduces power consumption for cooling by 22.8%.

An underwater data centre (UDC) can operate using less energy because there are natural cooling effects from being submerged. When Microsoft released its finding from Project Natick (a two-year experiment where a data centre was installed approximately 35 metres underwater near the Orkney Islands in Scotland), they found the consistently cool subsurface seas allow for energy-efficient data centre designs.

The Microsoft team also hypothesised that UDCs result in fewer broken servers, due to the atmosphere being sealed off with nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen.

Unlike Project Natick, the development in China has accelerated from a pilot project to a commercial rollout within three years, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, Zhang Ning tells Scientific American.

The administrative committee says the completion of the project marks a breakthrough in the integrated development of UDCs and offshore renewable energy. It provides a demonstration for the green and low-carbon development of computing infrastructure, and for the local consumption of offshore wind power.

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