China Completes Construction on Worlds First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center

A cluster of servers can now be seen chugging away beneath the waves off the coast of Shanghai, where the East China Sea blends into the distance. This is officially the world’s first underwater data center (UDC) capable of running almost entirely on wind power. China managed to pull off this engineering achievement by spending just $226 million, demonstrating their commitment to combining renewable energy with large amounts of computational power.

HiCloud engineers, the team behind the project, essentially dropped a 2.3 megawatt demo unit into the sea about 10 kilometers off the shore of the Lingang Special Area. This is the type of location where trade and business zones are thriving, and it is now home to a submerged server farm that gets the majority of its electricity from adjacent offshore wind turbines. Over 95% of the power is generated by those wind turbines spinning around in the ocean, with the remainder coming from a small backup infrastructure to keep things running smoothly on very windy days. There are no large solar farms or gigantic batteries littering the seafloor here, only clean, consistent power from wind turbines that are both efficient and virtually unnoticeable.

The servers down there do not have to worry about overheating like their land-based counterparts. They have a system in place that pumps seawater behind the racks to remove heat while using no fresh water. Land datacenters require millions of gallons of cooling each day, enough to power a small town. This one is absolutely problem-free in that regard. Cooling demand for this system has dropped from 40-50% of total energy to less than 10%, so they are using 23% less energy than they would on land. Phase one has a power usage effectiveness score of 1.15 or better, which is way better than China’s 2025 mandate of 1.25 for large data centers.

HiCloud didn’t just stumble into this; they started testing the waters in 2021 with a prototype off Hainan Island, so China Telecom could get some real data on submerged devices. By 2023 that had turned into a full fledged operation and by February of this year they had added another module with 400 high performance servers to the cluster in Hainan. The Shanghai initiative ups the ante by connecting directly to wind farms, which no one has done at this scale before. These racks will be used for more than just storage; they will train AI models, support 5G networks and handle all data from smart industries and online commerce. Shanghai plans to invest $28 billion in this project by 2027 to reach 200 exaflops of raw processing power.

HiCloud is working with Shenergy Group for energy, Shanghai Telecom to connect the network, Shanghai INESA for tech smarts and CCCC Third Harbor Engineering to provide the muscle. And this combination is creating something massive: a 500 megawatt undersea network that will outperform the largest cloud providers today. Once phase two reaches 24 megawatts it will be time to start thinking about the next big push.

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