I don't know about you, but sometimes when I hear about just what big business AI data centres are, and the eye-watering revenue it generates for companies like AMD, my first reaction remains, "OH, get in the sea!" Well, turns out that's not an awful suggestion.
Earlier this week off the coast of Hainan Island Province, China, a 'data capsule' containing more than 400 heavy duty servers was installed on the sea floor (via Global Times). These submerged servers were then connected to an already underwater data centre alongside a coastally situated station in a bid to better support the country's rapidly expanding AI infrastructure.
China Media Group claims this computing centre will be capable of supporting DeepSeek-powered AI assistants through 7,000 conversations per second. The state owned media company also asserts the entire centre's computational power is comparable to that of 30,000 high-end gaming PCs—all enjoying the best liquid cooling the Earth has to offer.
The 18 by 3.6 metre submerged server structure is far from the first of its kind, with a 130,000 ton data centre also taking the plunge near Hainan back in 2023. Outside of China, Microsoft is just one company who has been toying with the idea of data centres under the sea since at least 2014.
When Microsoft concluded testing near the Orkney Islands, Scotland in 2020, the company observed the failure rate for submerged data centres was one-eighth of what it had otherwise seen with more traditionally land-based centres. I mean, at that time the company would've been working with a much smaller sample size (and more compact test centres to boot), but ultimately the big financial wins represented by natural cooling have proven too good not to scale up—though Microsoft itself chose not to.
Data centres are incredibly power hungry wherever you stick them, and all that power results in hardware temps that'll really make you sweat. The submerged computing centre in Hainan's reliance on seawater is presented as the energy efficient option, while its resting place somewhere in the South China Sea is billed as a win for security (though just because it's at the bottom of the sea does not mean it's necessarily safe).
Still, oceans of tech—a tech-lantis, if you will—remains a compelling image. I'm just far less thrilled that we're doing it in aid of not-actually-intelligent-AI.
