The facility, located in Lingshui county, hosts servers that power various digital services, from restaurant suggestions to travel tips, inside a 1,300-tonne underwater data cabin, roughly the weight of 1,000 passenger cars. The first phase of the project was completed earlier this year.
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Pu Ding, Project Manager at Shenzhen HiCloud Data Centre Technology, stated:
We put the entire data cabin in the deep sea because seawater can help cool down the temperature. Compared to land-based data centers, data centers under the sea can reduce energy consumption needed for cooling, helping to lower operational costs.
Each cabin, submerged 35 meters (about 115 feet) underwater, houses 24 server racks, accommodating between 400 and 500 servers.
As part of Hainan’s 14th Five-Year Plan, the province aims to build a subsea data center complex with 100 such cabins, forming the heart of a new industrial hub focused on emerging technologies that drive the maritime or blue economy.
In 2024, China also introduced a pilot policy permitting full foreign ownership of data centers and value-added telecom services in Hainan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, an effort to strengthen its digital infrastructure amid growing tech rivalry with the United States.
In comparison, Microsoft launched Project Natick in 2014 to test underwater data centers, deploying an experimental unit with 855 servers off the coast of Scotland in 2018. However, by 2024, the company confirmed the project had concluded after a two-year trial, making China’s new initiative the first to reach full commercial deployment.
SOURCE SubSeaCables
