China has taken a novel approach to delivering more environmentally friendly AI infrastructure — by pioneering undersea data centers.
And now what the Chinese government claims to be the first in the world is fully up and running, around six miles off the coast of Shanghai’s Lingang Special Area, a free trade zone to the southeast of the city.
Chinese media report that the wind-powered project has entered commercial operation, having been unveiled in June 2025. Production was completed in October, with successful trials conducted earlier this year.
The center is the result of a collaboration among local authorities, the engineering company Hi Cloud Technology, and the Chinese state, with the government in October revealing that the total investment was $226 million.
The facility has a total power capacity of 24 megawatts and hosts about 2,000 servers, including GPU clusters from local companies such as the state-owned China Telecom and privately owned LinkWise. The GPUs will be used to develop local large language models and annotate big data.
The center sits about 10 meters underwater, strategically located between two elements of the Lingang zone’s 200-megawatt wind farm, which has more than 50 turbines. This ensures that nearly all of the center’s electricity comes from renewable energy, using photoelectric composite cable.
The servers themselves are sealed inside pressure-resistant modules under the sea, which means the water, which has an average temperature of 53.6 degrees, assists with cooling — a major bonus when considering that about 40% of energy usage in land-based data centers is used for this purpose.
However, the long-term viability of sub-sea data centers remains to be proven, with concerns about saltwater corrosion, maintenance accessibility, and durability yet to be addressed.
The vast amounts of power required to run land-based AI data centers are becoming an increasingly pressing issue, ever more novel solutions are being sought, with a handful of US companies now seeking to operate them in space.
