Project is fueled by wind energy and promises to use at least 30% less electricity than data centers that currently exist on land. Microsoft has tried to do so and had problems.
Many companies – giants of technology, such as the Amazon, Microsoft e Google – They have begun to last years to install its in the driest regions in the world, believing that dry air reduces Risks of damage to the equipment, caused by moisture, pointed to one of the non -profit journalistic organization source and the Guardian.
These centers contain thousands of servers that operate 24 hours a day, and store gigantic volumes of information. The big problem is the heat that generatewhich requires the intensive use of cooling systems – which are responsible for about 40% of the electrical consumption of a typical data center, according to. Cooling is usually done with sprayed or evaporated water, often from underground sources, rivers or wastewater treated.
The answer of China It may be quite different: superpower is investing in DATA CENTERS SUBQUATICS To face the environmental challenges that growing investment in Artificial Intelligence (IA) brings.
The country will have started in June the construction of a submarine data center, about 10 kilometers from the coast of Shanghai, one of AI’s main Chinese centers.
The project, led by the company Hailanyun (also known as), is fed by wind energy and promises to use at least 30% less electricity than land data centers, thanks to the natural cooling that sea water provides.
The new Shanghai underwater center uses pipes that channel seawater through radiators installed at the back of server shelves, dissipating the heat more efficiently.
The center will be fed 97% by an offshore wind farm and the first phase will include 198 server shelves, with a capacity of between 396 and 792 AI -optimized servers, the company says. When it comes to operation, what is scheduled for September, It will have sufficient computational power to train a language model like GPT-3.5 in just one day.
In just two and a half years, the project went from a pilot project in Hainan province to large-scale commercial implementation. But not everything is good news.
Microsoft did it first
The concept of underwater data centers is not new. In this field with “Project Natick”, which began over a decade ago, where he submerged a container with over 800 servers off Scotland.
The project proved that these centers were viable, sustainable and even more reliable because of the airtight sealing and the absence of corrosive oxygen.
Microsoft seems to have abandoned project development, but says it continues to use it as a research platform to test new approaches to the reliability and sustainability of digital infrastructure.
Especially because of all, Microsoft identified a slight water heating Next to its prototype, although limited. And during sea heat waves, the unloading of even warmer water with less oxygen can threaten aquatic biodiversity.
There are also risks of security. One from 2024 revealed that certain sons Produced by underwater altifalands may damage submerged data centers. Are these data centers more vulnerable to attacks?
Hailanyun, however, replies that its centers are “friends of the environment”, citing evaluations made in 2020 in a test capsule in the river of Pearls in southern China, which indicated a temperature increase below a degree in the surrounding waters.
