Two years ago, we reported on China’s successful testing of an undersea data center (UDC) in the hope that it would reduce the use of valuable land and solve the problem of water-intensive cooling systems. This week, the first phase of the UDC construction in Shanghai was successfully completed by Shanghai Hailanyun Technology.
It cost RMB 1.6 billion (~RM 945 million) and uses electricity generated by a 24MW windmill with a cooling system that only requires seawater. In a conventional data center, the cooling system accounts for 50% of the operating costs. In a UDC, this is reduced to only about 10%.
The construction of the UDC is an effort to turn Shanghai into a smart city with various intelligent systems. This first phase is the first step towards building a UDC with a processing power of 200 exaFLOPS. It also meets the call of the Chinese government to reduce the use of electricity and water supply in data centers in the near future.
