New Chinese Data Center Is Wind-Powered and Underwater

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 ...