China Sinks 1400-Ton Data Center In Sea With Power of 6 Million PCs

According to China Daily, China has become the world's first nation to deploy a commercial data center underwater. Interesting Engineering reports: China's attempts to set up a commercial data center underwater are the result of a public-private enterprise involving the China Offshore Oil Engineering Co., the country's largest Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation (EPCI) company in the country, and Highlander, a private data center company. Although details of the computing hardware have not been shared, Highlander has claimed that each of its underwater modules is capable of processing over four million high-definition (HD) images in just 30 seconds.

The computing hardware is packed inside a watertight storage module and together weighs 1,300 tons. The module is being submerged about 115 feet (35 m) under the water, a process that takes about three hours. Although work on installing the first module has begun, Highlander has ambitious plans to install 100 such modules at the site and build a capacity of nearly six million computers working at a time. Such a staggering number of computers will also generate a lot of heat which will be naturally cooled by the surrounding sea water. This alone is expected to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity that would have otherwise been spent on cooling if the facility were located on land.

Additionally, the facility, which is expected to be in place by 2025, will also save 732,000 square feet (68,000 square meters) of terrestrial land that can be used for other purposes and 105,000 tons of fresh water, which would be used for cooling efforts. The modules have been built to last 25 years, but a lot remains unknown about how the construction will be impacted by corrosive seawater and underwater ecosystems. Highlander's experience in setting these centers up is fairly limited to the tests it carried out in January of 2021 in the Guangdong port of Zhuhai.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.