China has begun operations of what the source describes as the world’s first undersea data center directly powered by offshore wind. The Shanghai Lingang undersea data center demonstration project, built by a subsidiary of China Communications Construction, officially entered operation in May in waters off China’s eastern coast.
The project is located about 10 kilometers (approx. 6.2 miles) offshore in Shanghai’s Lingang area and has a planned capacity of 24 megawatts (approx. 81.9 million BTU/h). According to the source, this is enough to power roughly 20,000 households.
Developers call the core design a “direct offshore wind connection” model. Electricity generated by offshore wind farms is transmitted directly to submerged data modules through subsea photoelectric composite cables, bypassing traditional grid-routing systems.
The system uses seawater as a natural cooling source through a circulating copper-pipe heat exchange design. The source states that this reduces electricity consumption by 22.8 percent, eliminates freshwater use entirely and cuts land usage by more than 90 percent.
Tsinghua University Professor Li Zhen said conventional data centers typically use about one-third of their total electricity consumption on cooling systems. “For an undersea data center of the same scale, the electricity used for cooling would only account for about one-tenth of total power consumption,” Li said.
China’s data centers currently consume around 250 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, Li said, with roughly 80 billion kWh used for environmental cooling. “If data centers of the same scale were placed underwater, even allowing extra margins, cooling consumption could fall to around 30 billion kWh,” Li said. “That would save about 50 billion kWh of electricity each year.”
