The China has unveils the World's first AI-powered underwater data center in Hainan, using seawater cooling for eco-friendly, high-performance computing.
The island province of Hainan in south China is known for its sandy beaches and duty-free shopping malls. Now, the waters off the coast of south Hainan are home to a groundbreaking innovation: a "smart brain" in the sea.
Around few month ago, a white cylindrical data module, measuring 18 meters long and 3.6 meters in diameter, was lowered into the sea by a crane ship, where it sank to a depth of 30 meters near Lingshui Li Autonomous County. It houses over 400 high-performance servers, and is connected to an underwater data center first deployed in March 2023. This marks the completion of the world's first commercial underwater intelligent computing cluster.
The achievement marks a milestone in China's quest to harness marine resources for next-generation computing power.
The cluster's current computing capacity equals 30,000 high-end gaming PCs working simultaneously, completing in one second what would take a standard computer a year. It supports AI assistants like DeepSeek to process approximately 7,000 intelligent interactions per second, said Pu Ding, general manager of Hainan underwater data center demonstration project.
"By integrating with the operational underwater data center, this cluster establishes a bridge for data transmission through coastal stations, enabling seamless connectivity with client systems," he explained.
Pu said that the center had already inked contracts with nearly 10 enterprises, targeting applications in AI model training, industrial simulation, gaming, and marine research.
For AI, the center's power could shrink model training from months to weeks. In gaming, it enables complex rendering and stable multiplayer operations, Pu said.
Intelligent computing centers, often dubbed "AI brain factories," process massive datasets and provide the backbone for training and operating large-scale AI models.
The Lingshui project represents a fusion of marine engineering and data infrastructure, which raises questions: why build a computing center underwater? How does it advance China's computational capabilities?