en.Wedoany.com Reported - The world's first commercially operational subsea data center with direct offshore wind power connection has been deployed and put into operation in the East China Sea area east of Xiaoyangshan, Lingang, Shanghai. The project has a total investment of 1.6 billion yuan, with an overall planned installed capacity of 24 megawatts. The first-phase demonstration project has an installed capacity of 2.3 megawatts, with a total module weight of 1,950 tons. By relocating the data center from land to the seabed, it has fundamentally changed the resource consumption model of traditional computing infrastructure.
This offshore platform rises over 20 meters above sea level and connects to the onshore power grid and communication network via a submarine composite cable. The core logic behind submerging the data center on the seabed lies in utilizing natural marine conditions to overcome the three major challenges long faced by land-based data centers: high electricity consumption, high water consumption, and large land footprint. Approximately 40% of the electricity consumed by traditional data centers is used for cooling and heat dissipation, whereas the average annual seawater temperature in this sea area remains stable at 15°C, making it a natural and efficient cooling medium. The project employs a passive refrigerant circulation technology, using seawater as a cold source to directly carry away the heat generated by server operations. The entire process requires no pump drive and consumes no freshwater.
Project leader Chen Xiyi provided a set of precise calculations: a 2.3-megawatt data center using traditional freshwater cooling methods would consume 40,000 tons of freshwater annually, equivalent to the domestic water usage of an average household for about 100 years. The subsea data center replaces freshwater with seawater for heat exchange, reducing freshwater consumption to zero. On the power side, the project is directly connected to an adjacent offshore wind farm, supplied directly by clean energy, achieving on-site coupling of computing facilities with renewable energy and further reducing carbon emission intensity.
The design of the subsea data module balances the reliability requirements for long-term underwater operation. The module is constructed with high-strength, corrosion-resistant steel and a multi-layer sealing structure, with its interior filled with inert gas to protect electronic equipment, and has a design lifespan of 25 years. Servers are integrated into the sealed module through standardized cabinets, and maintenance and replacement follow a "whole module lifting, onshore maintenance" model—when maintenance is required, the entire data module is hoisted onto a service vessel, equipment is replaced onshore, and then it is re-submerged. This approach circumvents the technical risks of underwater disassembly and assembly operations, keeping a single maintenance cycle within 72 hours.
The Shanghai Lingang Subsea Data Center project was undertaken by Shenzhen Hailanyun Data Center Technology Co., Ltd. for overall design and engineering implementation. The project is included in Shanghai's Major New Infrastructure Project List and is also a pilot demonstration project for "New Data Centers" under China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The first phase of the project completed equipment commissioning and entered the customer testing phase by the end of 2025, currently primarily providing edge computing and cloud service access capabilities to financial, internet, and scientific research institutions.
Globally, subsea data centers remain a cutting-edge technology direction. Microsoft launched the Natick project in 2018, deploying a 40-foot-long experimental subsea data module in the waters off the Orkney Islands, Scotland, at a depth of 117 feet. After two years of operation, it was retrieved, verifying the feasibility of underwater deployment, but the Natick project did not enter the commercialization phase. In comparison, the Shanghai Lingang Subsea Data Center is the world's first subsea computing facility to directly connect to offshore wind power and provide actual customer services, having made the leap from experimental verification to commercial operation.
China's computing power infrastructure is accelerating its evolution towards green and intensive development. Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that in 2025, the total scale of in-use data center racks in China exceeded 10 million standard racks, with total computing power reaching 280 EFLOPS. Solutions such as subsea deployment, direct green power connection, and natural cold source utilization are successively entering engineering practice, and the spatial layout of computing infrastructure is expanding from a single land-based concentration to coordinated land-sea development.
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