THE world’s first commercial underwater data center is now fully operational off the coast of Lingshui County in Hainan Province, according to media reports.

Hainan has been promoting the expansion of its marine economy to attract foreign investment as part of development in the country’s largest pilot free‑trade zone. That push has created growing demand for large‑scale computing and server capacity to support a wide range of digital services. The new facility, developed and operated by Shenzhen HiCloud Data Center Technology — a division of Beijing‑based maritime equipment maker Highlander — traces its research and testing back to 2020.

The first batch of undersea modules was launched in December 2022 and, project general manager Pu Ding said, is currently running stably. The center houses servers inside a 1,300‑ton data cabin positioned about 35 meters below the sea surface. Each cabin contains 24 server racks capable of hosting roughly 400 to 500 servers.

Undersea deployment reduces the energy required for cooling because ocean currents keep the equipment at low temperatures, avoiding the energy‑intensive air cooling or evaporative systems used on land. The sealed modules are free of dust and oxygen, which Pu told People’s Daily reduces electronic faults and enables a higher computing power density than many land‑based facilities. The modules are expected to have a service life of about 25 years.

Pu also said the project would yield substantial resource savings: roughly 122 million kWh of energy per year, 68,000 square meters of land, and about 105,000 tons of freshwater annually.

“The construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port has created a huge demand for offshore data centers. The undersea data center can provide support for the development of the digital economy, and will facilitate safe and orderly cross‑border data flows in the FTP,” said Su Yang, executive director of Shenzhen HiCloud.

HiCloud’s underwater tests in 2021 helped spur interest in the concept, and several Chinese regions have since incorporated offshore data centers into their five‑year plans.

The commercial facility was announced in early 2022 to be built by COOEC. HiCloud says it has received orders from customers including China Telecom and AI and surveillance firm SenseTime.

Microsoft was an earlier pioneer: its Project Natick deployed an underwater data center to serve Azure cloud workloads off the U.S. Pacific coast in 2015, followed by a two‑year trial off the Orkney Islands in Scotland.

Like HiCloud, Microsoft reported that submerging hardware in sealed, oxygen‑free modules improved equipment reliability. However, Microsoft has not moved forward with large‑scale commercial rollouts beyond its trials, despite holding a patent for a so‑called “digital reef.”(SD-Agencies)