China is seen developing their computing infrastructure rapidly lately. Apart from developing smart device chips, artificial intelligence components and so on, they are also recently reported to be developing a data center that will be placed on the seabed for the purpose of efficient cooling and reducing land use.
This submarine data center is developed in stages where they will develop a data storage unit that comes with the ability to process four million high-resolution images in 30 seconds. It is estimated that each unit has a computing capacity of 60 thousand computers.
The specifications of these data storage units are labeled as secret, but it is confirmed that each unit comes with a large number of storage shelves, and each data storage unit weighs 1.3 tons. This project, which started in April this year, is located around the southern waters of Hainan.
This data storage unit was slowly lowered 35 meters deep to the seabed, and it took about three hours to ensure that the components of this data storage unit did not encounter any problems. So far it has been reported that two of these storage units have been lowered to the seabed and this data center is expected to be 68,000 square meters in size, or the size of 10 football fields.
Another advantage of this data center is the saving of 122 million KWh of electricity and 105 thousand tons of clean water saved by cooling the seabed. It is expected that this data center project will be completed around the second quarter of 2025 and will cost $879 million to build.