The world’s first commercial underwater data centre is now operational in China’s Hainan, as the island province pushes to attract foreign investment by expanding the blue economy in the country’s largest pilot free-trade zone.
The servers manage digital services from restaurant recommendations to travel hacks, and will be installed in a 1,300-tonne underwater data cabin – equivalent to the weight of 1,000 passenger cars – after the first phase of construction was completed in Lingshui county this year.
“We put the entire data cabin in the deep sea because seawater can help cool down the temperature,” Pu Ding, project manager at Shenzhen HiCloud Data Centre Technology, told the Chinese media outlet Financial News.
“Compared to land-based data centres, data centres under the sea can reduce energy consumption needed for cooling, helping to lower operational costs.”
Each cabin, located 35 metres (114.8 feet) underwater, contains 24 server racks capable of hosting 400 to 500 servers, according to Financial News.
Under Hainan’s fourteenth five-year plan, the province proposed building a subsea data centre featuring 100 data cabins. The project is central to an integrated industrial estate focused on developing new technologies for the blue economy.
Amid intensifying technological competition with the United States, China launched a pilot programme in 2024 allowing full foreign ownership of data centres and value-added telecoms services in Hainan and three other hubs: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
“This policy update is a response to mounting global demand for data centre services fuelled by advances in generative AI and cloud computing,” said Giulia Interesse, an editor at China Briefing issued by consulting firm Dezan Shira and Associates.
“By opening its borders to full foreign ownership, China is aiming to attract multinational tech giants eager to tap into its market potential,” she added.
By contrast, Microsoft began working on Project Natick, an underwater data centre, in 2014. But in 2024, the American tech giant confirmed that it was no longer active after the company sank the data centre, comprising 855 servers, off the coast of Scotland in 2018, where it had been trialled for two years.