- China's HiCloud became the latest to deploy an underwater data center
- It is planning to scale up to a 500 MW subsea deployment in the future
- Microsoft has also experimented with underwater deployments, but there are still big hurdles in play
Chinese tech startup HiCloud Technology is taking liquid cooling to the extreme. The company just announced the launch of a new underwater data center facility off the coast of Shanghai near the city's Lingang area.
Founded by the Highlander Group in 2020, HiCloud has been experimenting with underwater data centers since 2021 and signed an agreement to deploy its new facility back in June. The 24 megawatt (MW) pod HiCloud just lit up runs on power from an offshore wind farm.
While 24 MW sounds like small potatoes when contrasted with other initiatives like the multi-gigawatt Stargate projects, HiCloud said it has plans to scale up. Way up.
“We will build a 500 MW UDC in the future,” the company said on LinkedIn.
Interestingly (though perhaps unsurprisingly), the project has garnered support from state-owned domestic fixed and mobile operator China Telecom. The company contributed some of its expertise in data center construction and networking to help bring HiCloud’s facility online.
Looking ahead, China Telecom is considering offering its users “‘land + subsea’ hybrid [cloud] deployment solutions,” HiCloud stated. China Telecom is also looking to leverage HiCloud’s underwater data center to “enhance the coverage capability of the marine 5G network.”
Other underwater experiments
Microsoft launched Project Natick in 2018, which featured experimental deployments of data center infrastructure in underwater environments in the U.S. and U.K. over the course of two years. The infrastructure was deployed in 40-foot-long pods, which contained 12 racks of 864 servers.
But there are open questions besides the obvious “can it be done?" For instance, AvidThink Founder Roy Chua pointed to concerns about economic and operational hurdles, as well as potential environmental impacts.
"Servicing submerged cutting-edge hardware will continue to be challenging: replacing, upgrading or repairing servers requires specialized marine operations," he said. "This is on top of underwater placement overhead, permitting, maritime jurisdiction and potential environmental impact (especially given the increased thermals for AI data centers) — perhaps more relevant for data center companies outside of China."
Data centers might be uniquely vulnerable to sonic attacks due to the sound propagation characteristics of water. A recent paper suggested that such threats are indeed a legitimate concern.
Dell'Oro Group Research Director Alex Cordovil said he views rollouts like HiCloud's as "more of a proof-of-concept type of deployment—or even just a marketing gimmick." But that doesn't mean there's no role for the sea in the future of data centers. Cordovil said seawater cooling—that is, evaporative cooling for land-based data centers that uses seawater rather than freshwater—has some potential.