{"id":111817,"date":"2025-08-26T17:49:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-26T17:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/111817\/"},"modified":"2025-08-26T17:49:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-26T17:49:09","slug":"china-has-built-the-first-underwater-ai-data-center-cooled-by-the-ocean-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/111817\/","title":{"rendered":"China Has Built the First Underwater AI Data Center Cooled by the Ocean Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"An <\/a>An artist\u2019s rendering of a wind-powered underwater data center being built off the coast of Shanghai.\u00a0Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology<\/p>\n

Just off the coast of Shanghai, beneath the churn of offshore wind turbines, China is launching a new kind of digital infrastructure\u2014one that could reshape how the world powers its artificial intelligence boom.<\/p>\n

Encased in watertight pods and cooled by ocean currents, the world\u2019s first commercial underwater AI data center is now coming online. The facility, built by the Chinese tech firm Hailanyun, is designed to handle the kinds of intensive computational tasks that are quickly becoming the lifeblood of modern economies, from training large language models to powering real-time complex simulations.<\/p>\n

And it does so with almost no freshwater, no bulky air conditioning units, and nearly zero carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cChina\u2019s ambitious approach signals a bold shift toward low-carbon digital infrastructure, and it could influence global norms in sustainable computing,\u201d Shabrina Nadhila, an analyst at the energy think tank Ember, told Live Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Cooling Crisis Brought Upon by AI<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s artificial intelligence is a hot topic, literally. Servers in modern data centers perform trillions of calculations each second, generating intense heat that must be constantly removed to prevent damage and preserve performance.<\/p>\n

Nearly 40% of the energy<\/a> used by a typical land-based data center goes to cooling. Most centers rely on freshwater, either sprayed, evaporated, or chilled and pumped around the machines. But this comes with a steep price: every day, these systems consume hundreds of thousands of gallons\u2014water that might otherwise irrigate crops, flow through rivers, or fill drinking taps.<\/p>\n

Some of the world\u2019s biggest tech companies, including Google and Meta, have placed their data centers in dry, arid climates like Arizona or southern Spain, where the air\u2019s low humidity helps protect sensitive electronics. But this tradeoff\u2014better hardware conditions in exchange for even more water demand\u2014has drawn criticism as regions face worsening droughts and growing competition over natural resources.<\/p>\n

A 2023 study<\/a> from UC Riverside estimated that every 20 to 50 AI queries\u2014such as asking ChatGPT a question\u2014can require the evaporation of half a liter of freshwater. Training large models can be even worse: one estimate suggests GPT-3 may have consumed over 700,000 liters of water during training, although newer models are more efficient. <\/p>\n

Now, China is trying a radically different approach: skip the land entirely.<\/p>\n

Beneath the Waves, Beyond the Grid<\/p>\n

Instead of using chillers and fans, Hailanyun\u2019s underwater data center takes advantage of the ocean\u2019s natural thermal stability. The facility uses sealed pipes to pump seawater across radiators attached to its server racks, absorbing heat and carrying it away in a slow, constant flow. According to internal assessments conducted with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, this method slashes electricity use by at least 30% compared with land-based systems.<\/p>\n

The new center is also powered almost entirely by a nearby offshore wind farm, which provides 97% of its energy, according to Hailanyun spokesperson Li Langping.<\/p>\n

The first operational pod contains 198 server racks\u2014enough to run between 396 and 792 AI-ready servers. Hailanyun says this setup is powerful enough to train a model like GPT-3.5 in a single day. But it\u2019s still a small step compared to the scale of China\u2019s AI ambitions. Traditional mid-size data centers in the country can house 3,000 racks or more. Superscale facilities exceed 10,000.<\/p>\n

Even so, researchers are taking note. Hailanyun transitioned from a pilot project launched in Hainan in December 2022 to full commercial deployment in under 30 months, \u201csomething Microsoft\u2019s Project Natick never attempted,\u201d said Zhang Ning, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, as per Live Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Project Natick was Microsoft\u2019s own attempt at ocean-based computing. In 2018, the company sank a sealed server pod off the coast of Scotland. After two years, they found it had lower hardware failure rates than land-based centers\u2014thanks in part to its nitrogen-filled, human-free environment. But Microsoft has since shelved the project, noting only that it remains \u201ca research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

China, by contrast, is moving fast\u2014and at scale.<\/p>\n

Not Without Consequences<\/p>\n

Despite the environmental promise, ocean-based data centers raise difficult questions. Warm water discharge can lower oxygen levels in the surrounding seawater, especially during marine heatwaves. Aquatic organisms already stressed by rising ocean temperatures may find it harder to survive if nearby outflows push temperatures higher or disrupt local chemistry.<\/p>\n

Microsoft researchers found their prototype caused water temperatures to rise only by \u201ca few thousandths of a degree\u201d in nearby currents\u2014but that was under controlled, cooler North Atlantic conditions.<\/p>\n

Hailanyun, for its part, says its own tests showed a rise of less than one degree Celsius in surrounding waters\u2014\u201cvirtually no substantial impact,\u201d according to Li Langping.<\/p>\n

Security is another concern. A 2024 study <\/a>from the University of Florida found that certain sound frequencies, such as those transmitted by underwater speakers, could potentially damage server systems. Researchers have since developed machine learning tools to detect and counter these threats early, but the vulnerability highlights how underwater infrastructure faces unique risks.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s repair. What\u2019s routine on land, such as swapping out a failed hard drive or checking a connection, becomes slow, expensive, and dangerous when it involves divers or robotic subs.<\/p>\n

Still, the ocean offers benefits that land can\u2019t match: no dust, no seismic vibrations, and no temperature swings. All of which can extend the life of sensitive hardware.<\/p>\n

\"Hailanyun <\/a>Hailanyun places the first phase of its underwater data center into the ocean off the coast of Hainan in December 2022.\u00a0Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun Technology<\/p>\n

A Blueprint for the Future?<\/p>\n

For now, China\u2019s experiment is unique. But interest is growing elsewhere. South Korea has announced plans for its own undersea facilities. Japan and Singapore are considering floating data centers\u2014moored above the water, but still tapping the ocean for cooling.<\/p>\n

Zhang, the researcher at UC Davis, believes the trend could spread if countries can resolve the regulatory, ecological, and supply-chain issues that China is already tackling.<\/p>\n

And as AI continues to scale, those pressures won\u2019t go away.<\/p>\n

After all, there\u2019s no shortage of seawater. What\u2019s lacking is a sustainable vision for how to feed an AI future without burning through our most precious resources.<\/p>\n

By sinking its servers into the deep, China may have surfaced an answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An artist\u2019s rendering of a wind-powered underwater data center being built off the coast of Shanghai.\u00a0Credit: Shanghai Hailanyun…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[182,191,73102,7258,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-111817","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-computing","10":"tag-cooling","11":"tag-data-centers","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}