China’s Underwater Data Center HiCloud Gets AI Upgrade

A Chinese underwater data center operated by HiCloud near Língshuǐ in Hainan Province will receive a new module with computing equipment. The module will be connected to the existing data center, which was commissioned in 2023, according to Datacenter Dynamics. HiCloud began testing the underwater data center in 2021, and in January last year, it was reported that the modules, cooled by seawater, had proven their functionality and reliability.

According to the Chinese publication Ecns, a new 18-meter module (3.6 m in diameter) was recently submerged in the sea. According to Chinese data, the module contains 400 high-performance servers and is connected to a ground station nearby. What equipment is installed in the data center is not specified, but it is said that the module is equivalent in performance to “30 thousand advanced gaming computers” and is capable of performing in one second the work of an average computer in a year. In particular, it is announced that it is capable of processing 7 thousand requests per second when working with the DeepSeek AI model.

Image source: HiCloud

Ten companies have reportedly already signed agreements to use the new facilities for AI-related tasks such as training and inference, industrial simulation, game development, and marine research. The HiCloud modular underwater data center is believed to be the first commercial facility of its kind in the world, although similar experiments have already been conducted by several data center players.

The most famous was the underwater data center built as part of the Project Natick initiative. Its implementation began off the coast of Scotland in 2018. The test used 855 servers, which showed good results. True, Microsoft later curtailed the work of the underwater data center, but intends to use the results obtained in other projects. Two startups, Subsea Cloud and NetworkOcean, are preparing their own underwater data centers, but the latter seems to have encountered problems in obtaining a license for tests in San Francisco Bay.