While many tech giants are busy building data centers that gobble up resources on land, China has quietly revolutionized the industry by going underwater. In October 2025, they completed the world’s first wind-powered underwater data center in Shanghai’s Lin-gang Special Area. Not just a small experiment. A full-blown, 1.6 billion yuan investment that’s changing the game.
China’s underwater revolution: turning ocean depths into green data hubs while land-based competitors fall behind.
The numbers are impressive. Twenty-four megawatts of power capacity, mostly from offshore wind. Over 95% green electricity. And get this: 22.8% less power consumption, 100% water savings, and 90% reduced land use compared to traditional data centers. Who needs real estate when you’ve got the ocean floor?
These aren’t just metal boxes dropped in the sea. The engineering is submarine-level sophisticated. Pressure-resistant steel hulls. Servers sealed in inert gas environments to prevent corrosion.
And the cooling system? Pure genius. The surrounding seawater acts as a natural heat exchanger. No pumps. No chillers. Just nature doing the work, achieving a power usage effectiveness of 1.1 – making land-based centers look like energy hogs.
China’s not stopping at Shanghai either. There’s another major installation off Hainan Island in the South China Sea. We’re talking 1,300-ton capsules sitting 35 meters underwater. These installations have shown exceptional reliability with failure rates significantly lower than traditional data centers.
They’ve been scaling up since 2020, with commercial deployment kicking into high gear in 2023 and expanding throughout 2025.
The ambition is staggering. Shanghai wants to build a coastal computing hub with capacity of 200 exaFLOPS. For context, Tesla’s supercomputers hit just 1.8 exaFLOPS in 2021.
Several Chinese corporations are already partnering for a 500 MW offshore wind-powered underwater data center cluster.
It’s all part of China’s broader green economy push. Zero water consumption. Minimal land use. Nearly all renewable energy. The project showcases China’s commitment to the integrated development of underwater data centers with offshore renewable energy infrastructure.
While the rest of the world debates how to make data centers more efficient, China just moved them underwater. Problem solved.
