As a physical network of computing and storage facilities, inland data centers located on terra firma provide solid support for digital transformation. But what if a data center is placed underwater – even as deep as on the bottom of the ocean? Having completed construction in December, the world’s first commercial underwater data center is undergoing preparatory work for initial operations in seawaters just off Lingshui Li autonomous county, Hainan province, said its builder. Beijing Highlander Digital Technology Co, a company engaged in advanced sea technologies, was listed as a “little giant” company by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) in 2020. Whenever any vanguard technology announces itself as “the first of its kind”, there are typically plenty of questions, curiosity and speculation. Facing the most frequently asked one – why put a data center underwater? – the company has provided sufficient facts to show that generally speaking, the choice does have unique advantages over regular Internet Data Centers (IDCs).
An Underwater Data Center (UDC) uses ambient water as a natural cooling source for its equipment, which can help save more than 30% on energy costs versus traditional data centers. Without needing to prepare water for cooling purposes, a UDC saves about 30,000 cubic meters of water per megawatt each year, Highlander said. “In seawater with relatively low temperatures, the challenge to reduce the power usage effectiveness (PUE) rate – the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a computer data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment – of an underwater data center is actually not that great. The key point is to ensure the PUE still remains at a low level under natural high-temperature conditions, such as in tropical and subtropical sea regions,” said Pu Ding, General Manager of the UDC Hainan Pilot Development Project at Shenzhen HiCloud Data Center Technology Co, a unit focused on UDC construction under Beijing Highlander Digital Technology Co.
“The fact that our first project is carried out in Hainan, a major Chinese tropical island, demonstrates the company’s resolution to face the most challenging situations and tackle relevant technical problems when designing a UDC. “We chose ‘hard mode’ from the very beginning,” Pu said. In addition, by placing servers in sealed watertight cabins on the seabed, it is easier for a UDC to ensure a stable and safe operating environment since the sealed cabins are oxygen and dust-free, and can provide constant temperatures, humidity and pressure conditions for the servers inside and therefore guarantee physical data security. UDC servers outperform those on land, with the failure rate of UDC servers only one-eighth those of an IDC, according to experimental results from Microsoft’s Project Natick, the world’s first attempt at a UDC project. Although Highlander’s UDC is the first of its kind for commercial use, it was Microsoft that first launched relevant research and development (R&D) before completing construction of the world’s first UDC, Project Natick. Established in 2014, the Natick Northern Isles data center off the coast of the Orkney Islands, United Kingdom, is container-sized and was retrieved for analysis in 2020.
UDCs can also achieve multi-energy complementarity when utilizing both offshore wind and photovoltaic power. On the one hand, they convert ocean energy such as ocean waves, tides and temperature differentials into marine computing power, and thus help realize low-carbon and even zero-carbon development for the once high-energy-consuming data centers. On the other hand, UDCs make it easier to support computing needs from other marine industries, including offshore oil and gas drilling, marine ranching and marine tourism, helping build a smart marine industry cluster, save on comprehensive costs, and eventually promote a more fully-integrated use of sea resources, said Zhang Yanfang, Director of the Engineering Institute of the Offshore Oil Engineering Co, a subsidiary of China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), as reported by the China Daily.
