An idea that won't sink: China planning underwater datacenter deployment

Under the sea, under the sea... bit barnacle's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me

China is persevering with underwater datacenters - a deployment off the coast near Shanghai is expected to save on the energy costs of cooling compute infrastructure thanks to ocean currents.

Beijing-based Highlander Digital Technology is planning to submerge its latest seaborne bit barn (bit barnacle?) pods later this month, following an earlier trial deployment off the island of Hainan.

According to reports, the latest facility will serve clients such as China Telecom and a state-owned AI computing company, and is part of a broader push by the Chinese government for datacenter operators to lower their carbon footprint.

"Underwater operations have inherent advantages," Highlander vice president Yang Ye told the South China Morning Post. This includes heat being dissipated by ocean currents, rather than the energy-intensive cooling systems used by datacenters operating on dry land.  

The method is understood to translate into a saving of approximately 90 percent on the energy consumption that would otherwise be required for cooling. Power for the littoral bit barn will be supplied largely from nearby offshore wind farms, with the expectation that about 95 percent of the energy used by the facility will come from renewable sources.

Many Reg readers will recall that Microsoft famously experimented with underwater datacenters between 2015 and 2020 in trials designated Project Natick. These saw a small prototype facility deployed first in California to prove the concept, then a larger version lowered to the sea floor off Scotland's Orkney Islands.

Despite being declared a success, with servers in the canned bit barn experiencing a failure rate just 1/8th that of a land-based control group, Microsoft did not take the tech any further commercially after it retrieved Davy Jones's bitlocker from the water in 2020.

The Windows-maker has never discussed the reasons for not pursuing underwater datacenters, it is likely that with technology changing so fast in response to the hype surrounding AI, traditional land-based facilities are just easier to access for updates and maintenance.

However, researchers did report last year that underwater facilities could be vulnerable to attack using sound waves.

Others tech businesses have also hosted trials, with Subsea Cloud last year offering potential customers the chance to try out its underwater datacenter facilities deployed off the coast of Norway for up to 90 days. It claimed customers using its kit would see a 40 percent reduction in carbon emissions and a 30 percent cut in operational expenditure, plus no cooling costs.

Another alternative is the floating datacenter. Google experimented with this a decade or so ago, but Nautilus Data Technologies made this a reality with facilities in Marseille in France and another in Los Angeles, California, before shifting to focus on the EcoCore line of AI infrastructure.

Japanese shipping biz Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) announced a few months ago that it is planning to fit out a ship as a floating datacenter, planned to be operational by 2027, which can be moved to different locations in response to changes in demand. ®