China’s Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center Is Live

What changed since the last dive, and why China just flipped the switch on the world’s first offshore wind-powered server farm beneath the sea

Photo by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash

The last time I researched this topic, China’s underwater data ambitions were split into two. There was a fully functional facility off Hainan that had been operational since 2023, and a more polished, modern wind-powered facility near Shanghai that was still mid-construction.

The wind-powered facility is no longer a construction site.

As of late May 2026, it’s live. The best part is that it’s drawing power from a wind farm a few miles offshore rather than competing for resources meant for people. Real AI workloads are being run from the bottom of the East China Sea.

Some skeptics said that scaling this was impossible and it was all a publicity stunt. Those same skeptics now have an actual operational facility to argue with.

The timeline, for anyone who’s been out of the loop

This project progressed relatively fast by infrastructure standards. It kicked off in June 2025, when the Lingang Special Area administrative committee, a local investment group, and a company called HiCloud Technology signed a cooperation agreement to build it. By October 2025, construction was done.

By February 2026, officials confirmed that the price tag was roughly CNY 1.6 billion, which is about $228 million. These figures were for a facility with a planned total capacity of 24 megawatts.

By late May, seven months after the building was done, engineers gave the okay and switched it on for full operation.

What’s actually down there

The facility is about 10 meters underwater, and it’s also about six miles off the coast of Shanghai’s Lin-gang Special Area. It’s sandwiched between the first and second phases of the local offshore wind farm.

It’s surrounded by more than 50 turbines, and these turbines feed electricity directly to the modules without first routing through the regular grid. There are roughly 2,000 servers inside, a modest number compared to hyperscale facilities, which usually run 5,000 or more servers.

Still, this number of servers is enough to make a sizable dent in computing capacity when phase two scales the entire system up from the current 2.3 megawatt demo size to the full 24 megawatts.

Even if we decided to scrutinize the efficiency numbers, they will still hold up. According to developers who worked on the project, the setup cuts electricity consumption by 22.8 percent, entirely cancels out the need to use fresh water (which is my favorite part), and uses roughly 90% less land than similar facilities built on shore.

The power usage effectiveness also sits around 1.15, which is quite good for this industry.

HiCloud has also said the project saves close to 26,000 tons of water annually and avoids emissions roughly equivalent to pulling 600 cars off the road for a year.

Why cool servers with the ocean?

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

The pitch for this has not changed. Seawater is free. It’s also what has been called an endlessly renewing coolant. A server farm sits on the seabed and doesn’t fight for land space near inhabited areas or cities.

What’s new is that this same pitch that we have all heard a bunch of times has now been paired with a dedicated offshore wind farm instead of a regular grid.

The GPU clusters running inside the modules (this includes hardware from China Telecom and computing providers) are being used for big data annotation and the development of domestic AI language models. The workloads are split between the offshore modules and the onshore facilities depending on demand.

This is an industry where data centers are straining regional power grids. So plugging directly into wind generation that would otherwise need to be stored is what I’d call an intelligent approach.

A quick rewind, for context

While people were debating about building data centers in Antarctica, China was already working on something more feasible. The facility that just went live in late May is not China’s first attempt at this.

Towards the end of 2023, roughly the same approach minus the wind turbines debuted off Hainan. This is where Highlander, the marine technology company, sank sealed cabins holding hundreds of servers each, with further plans to later build a hundred of them.

This was the project that stood as proof that the basic concept worked. The version used in the Shanghai facility is the one that adds renewable power into the equation, and it’s the one that’s popular because it delivers on both the green infrastructure pitch and the novel-engineering one.

The parts that remain unsolved

I love what China has accomplished, but none of this gives satisfactory answers to the genuine open questions. There’s a huge difference between servicing a rack in a warehouse and servicing a sealed module sitting on the seabed.

A maintenance crew cannot simply walk over with replacement parts. Currently, operators are depending more on remote monitoring and redundancy while crossing their fingers in hopes that nothing fails between scheduled visits.

This is roughly the same strategy that Microsoft employed with Project Natick, its own underwater data center experiment that stretched from 2015 through 2018 off Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The servers in this case turned out to be highly reliable compared to their land-based counterparts.

Despite this, Microsoft still made the decision to shut the project down in 2024 without taking the step to commercially deploy. It turns out that reliability and economic serviceability are two separate problems.

There’s also a somewhat strange risk that was flagged by researchers in a 2024 study. Theoretically speaking, underwater facilities are vulnerable to targeted acoustic attacks. This is something that most data center security teams have never had to think about.

And the fish?

There’s still the question of how all this affects the environment. The heat generated by servers has to go somewhere. In this case, it dissipates into the surrounding water.

Andrew Want, a marine ecologist at the University of Hull, made the point that an increase in water temperature near these facilities could act as a magnet for particular species and push others away. There simply isn’t enough long-term data, yet that can give an indication of how this is going to affect the ecosystem in the area. A 2020 assessment near Zhuhai showed that small-scale operations did not spike water temperatures to unsafe levels.

Separately, researchers have also warned that in the event of marine heat waves, additional warmth from data centers has the likelihood of lowering dissolved oxygen and subsequently stressing local marine life.

So far, the current evidence does not point to catastrophe. But scaling from a small operation to a 24 megawatt one should mean that monitoring should also increase.

Why this matters

China’s AI buildout needs enormous amounts of power, and the country is clearly betting that underwater, wind-connected infrastructure is one credible way to keep growing that capacity without melting the grid or draining freshwater supplies.

Ember analyst Shabrina Nadhila has called this kind of approach a meaningful signal toward low-carbon digital infrastructure, one that could shape how other countries think about data center design. A more skeptical read is that exporting cheap, green-branded AI compute is also a geopolitical play, not just an environmental one. Both things can be true at once.

The issue that is no longer debatable is whether this setup works on a commercial scale. Just recently, all we had was a press release and a half-finished platform. But now, the facility is online, pulling on wind power, and cooling itself with the ocean. Now let’s see if the rest of the world follows suit.