China deploys its first underwater data center and it is colossal

Submerged off the coast of Hainan Island at a depth of 35 meters, China’s first underwater data center ultimately aims to achieve processing power equivalent to six million computers.

China is moving forward with the installation of a giant underwater data center (like in Marseille, for example). According to information relayed by the state television channel CCTV, a new module has just been installed off the coast of Sanya, a coastal city located in the south of the island of Hainan. The first module was submerged last April.

Each unit weighs 1,300 tonnes and can process more than four million high-definition images in 30 seconds. According to comments from CCTV, this power is equivalent to that of 60,000 computers working together, but it is not known how many servers make up this infrastructure. It is planned to deploy around a hundred of these modules designed to last 25 years. The completion of this data center is scheduled for the second quarter of 2025. Ultimately, the processing capacity would be equivalent to that of six million computers.

An area equivalent to ten football fields

Microsoft popularized the idea of ​​the submerged data center in 2018 with its experimental Natick project which took place in Scottish waters for two years. The benefits of underwater data centers are numerous. First of all, for the cooling of the installations which occurs naturally in contact with sea water, which avoids consuming enormous quantities of fresh water, as land installations do. In the case of China’s gigantic data center, this also frees up 68,000 m² of surface area that the 100 modules would occupy on dry land.

According to figures cited in the report, this underwater installation will save 122 million kilowatt hours of electricity and 105,000 tons of fresh water per year. The project represents a budget of 879 million dollars. Beijing Sinnet, a cloud computing specialist, operates this installation. More such data centers are planned in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta regions.

Source : Tom’s Hardware