With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the innovative data center uses seawater as a natural cooling system.
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country's strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
This feature solves one of the main energy consumption challenges of conventional data centers, where air conditioning systems typically account for 40 to 50 percent of the total electricity required to operate.
The thermal efficiency of the UDC is directly reflected in its power-usage effectiveness, or PUE. This metric is used by the industry to evaluate the energy performance of a data center; 1.0 represents the maximum theoretical efficiency. In its first phase, the Lin-gang facility is designed to achieve a PUE of no more than 1.15, a figure considered state-of-the-art within the industry.
Under this same cooling principle, HiCloud opened the world's first commercial underwater data center in 2023 in Hainan, an island located in southern China. However, the Shanghai complex marks a milestone as the first to operate using offshore wind power.
Construction of the UDC was completed in mid-October last year. According to the Chinese government, "compared to traditional onshore data centers, the project is designed to use more than 95 percent green electricity, reducing energy consumption by 22.8 percent, and water and land use by 100 percent and more than 90 percent, respectively."
The opening of the complex is an important step in China's efforts to optimize energy supply through renewable sources and, at the same time, sustain its leadership in computing capacity linked to AI development.
A report recently published by the UN points out that only 32 countries host data centers specialized in artificial intelligence. Of that global infrastructure, about 90 percent is concentrated in two nations: China and the United States.
Both powers have taken steps to secure the energy demanded by AI development, albeit through different approaches. While the United States has reduced investments and proposals related to the energy transition, China seeks to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels both to meet its climate goals and to reduce its vulnerability to external suppliers.
Beijing's energy self-sufficiency strategy stands out in this context. As the world's largest energy consumer, the country is exploring technologies ranging from the use of materials such as thorium and bismuth to the accelerated expansion of renewable energies and nuclear generation.
Last year, a new energy law came into force, which prioritizes the development of renewable sources and hydrogen in order to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and strengthen national energy security. The legislation also obliges the authorities to set minimum targets for consumption from clean sources.
In parallel, the country launched a profound reform of its electricity market. As of June 2025, all solar and wind energy is required to be traded through market mechanisms or auctions, gradually eliminating the old feed-in tariff schemes. These measures, accompanied by financial incentives and the phasing out of legacy subsidies, aim to boost investment in clean technologies and improve the efficiency of the energy system.
China's energy transition is not only driven by environmental considerations. It is also part of a long-term economic and geopolitical strategy aimed at strengthening its technological and industrial autonomy. In this context, the launch of the UDC represents a significant step forward that strengthens the country's position vis-à-vis the United States and the rest of the world in the race to build the infrastructure that will support the next generation of artificial intelligence and other technological advances.
The U.S. Department of Energy says the plant, fueled by oil and gas, will help avert an energy “emergency.” Environmentalists say there’s no
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
A half-century-old Pennsylvania power plant fueled by oil and natural gas will keep running beyond its scheduled shutdown date following an order from the Trump administration just one day before it was due to retire.
The Eddystone Generating Station near Philadelphia was to close permanently last Saturday because its owner determined it no longer made economic sense to run.
But an order from the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday directed the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, and grid manager PJM Interconnection to take “all measures necessary” to ensure that the two remaining generation units at the plant are available to operate. The order is effective until Aug. 28 and can be extended.
“Operational availability and economic dispatch of the aforementioned Eddystone Units 3 and 4 is necessary to best meet the emergency and serve the public interest,” said the order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He said the 90-day duration of the order was also intended to “minimize adverse environmental impacts.”
The order said the continued operation is justified by a national “energy emergency” declared by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, and by PJM’s responsibility to ensure electric reliability. On April 8, Trump issued another executive order saying that all available electricity supplies “must” be used to meet an unprecedented increase in national demand for power, especially to run artificial intelligence data centers. At the same time, the Trump administration has cracked down on efforts to expand renewable energy, including an executive order to freeze development of new offshore wind projects.
The new order is the second of its kind from Trump’s DOE. In late May, Wright directed the 1,560-megawatt J.H. Campbell Plant in western Michigan to stay open past its scheduled closure date, also last Saturday. The agency said action was needed to minimize the risk of blackouts and improve grid security.
On May 7, the final and award-giving ceremony of 2019 Digital China Innovation Competition were held at Fuzhou Strait International Conference & Exhibition Center. Wang Qinmin, Vice Chairman of the 12th CPPCC and General Counselor of the Competition, and Li Dejin, Vice Governor of Fujian Province, attended the ceremony and presented the awards to the winning teams.Yang Xueshan, professor of Peking University and former Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and Ni Guangnan and Li Peigen, both academicians of the CAS, delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony.This Competition has “Software-enabled Digital Economy and Innovation-driven Digital China” as its theme and designates six algorithm questions in the three major categories of big data, artificial intelligence and industrial Internet, i.e. “Cultural Inheritance: Multi-scene Identification of Chinese Calligraphy”,“Intelligent Tallying: AI Counting of Reinforcing Bars”, “Big Data Medicine: AI Diagnosis of Liver Cancer Images”, “Consumer Group Portrait: Intelligent Credit Rating”, “Intelligent Remedy of Offshore Wind farm SCADA Data Loss” and“Concrete Pump Truck Concrete Piston Failure Prelim”. All these questions have originated from the practical application scenes of Huawei, China Mobile, Golden Software, CECDATA and other enterprises and reflect the current social and industrial development needs. At the final, the 18 shortlisted teams, which stood out among all 8,000-odd teams during the online tryout and the division competition, fully demonstrated their charms and enlisted works through team introduction, solution explanation and expert Q&A. The judges scored the teams strictly according to the evaluation rules and determined the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prize winners of the six questions after a whole day’s fierce competition. The winners of four individual awards, i.e. Best Commercial Potential Award, Best Algorithm Competence Award, Best Innovation Value Award and Best Field Performance Award, were also selected.
Huawei Cloud BU (Enterprise Intelligence) provided Cultural Inheritance: Multi-scene Identification of Chinese Calligraphy competition. Senior artificial intelligence engineer Wang Jing introduced the background and hard points of the problem…
Trump is falling into an old energy trap. (Washington Post)
Excerpt:
The U.S. economy desperately needs more electricity. Demand is projected to outstrip supply in the coming years, largely due to data centers powering artificial intelligence. That leaves the government no choice: To avoid an energy crisis, it needs to supersize the nation’s electrical grid.
The Trump administration, apparently, hasn’t gotten the memo. Instead, it’s allowing its opposition to clean energy sources, such as wind and solar, to stymie growth.
Case in point: The Energy Department’s cancellation last month of a $4.9 billion loan guarantee for a major transmission project in the Midwest. The line, known as the Grain Belt Express, would cross 800 miles of farmland to deliver wind energy generated in Kansas to power more than 3 million homes in the region. This is exactly the sort of development the country needs to strengthen the grid and make use of its natural wind resources.
Yet the administration sided with NIMBYs who have long opposed the project, which has been in the works for more than a decade. The Energy Department explained in its announcement that it was “not critical for the federal government to have a role” in the project. It also claimed that the project is “unlikely” to meet the conditions required for the loan guarantee — without clearly laying out those conditions.
Invenergy, the company behind the project, has said it will pursue private financing. Hopefully that materializes, and ideally such undertakings could happen without any government backing. But the loss of the loan guarantee poses a serious threat both to the transmission line and to the renewable energy projects that would have been built to supply it.
Such paralysis is now typical of the U.S. energy system. Despite ever-increasing demand for electricity, construction of the new transmission lines needed to deliver it has slowed to a glacial pace. That’s because building the infrastructure across multiple jurisdictions is expensive and comes with painful regulatory headaches. And far too often, politics gets in the way, especially when it requires construction on privately owned land.
In 2024, only 322 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines were completed, one of the lowest annual figures in the past 15 years. An Energy Department study last year projected that, to meet the nation’s energy needs most optimally, regional transmission capacity would need to double by 2050 and interregional capacity would need to rise by a factor of 3.5. That would require the nation to build more than 5,000 miles of transmission lines a year, according to Americans for a Clean Energy Grid.
Despite President Donald Trump’s promises to “unleash American energy,” his administration seems to be actively working against that lofty goal. This month, New York’s Public Service Commission halted a new transmission line that would bring the state’s offshore wind power to New York City. Why? Because Trump’s executive order to stop offshore wind developments makes the power lines risky for taxpayers.
Meanwhile, the administration seems to be trying to kill solar and wind projects by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. This month, the Interior Department issued a directive requiring virtually every aspect of such developments on federal land — or those that pass through it via transmission lines — to receive personal approval from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum or his deputy. That policy change came shortly after Congress passed its reconciliation package, which restricted access to tax credits for any wind and solar project that does not begin construction by July 4, 2026. A bottleneck seems to be the goal.
The administration justifies its antisolar and -wind posture by arguing that other forms of energy, such as fossil fuels and nuclear power, are more reliable. It also leans on national security concerns, since China controls much of the supply chain for those industries.
But these points don’t stand up to scrutiny. To start, building up the renewable energy sector would help alleviate climate change in the long term, which itself would make the energy sector more reliable and boost national security.
The Day One executive orders call for more drilling—something that, really, nobody wants.
Excerpt from this essay by Bill McKibben published by The New Yorker:
The misuse of power under Donald Trump is to be taken for granted. Monday ’s list of executive actions on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry was entirely expected—this time around, there is no hesitation about withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (a decision that took four months in his first term), nor about opening up new lands for drilling, nor about rolling back regulations that have encouraged the production of electric cars. In fact, consider them all promises kept—in April of 2024, in a closed-door meeting soon uncovered by the pre-traumatized Washington Post, Trump laid out the terms to industry leaders. [The quote is from trump's begging for a billion dollars from the fossil fuel industry.]
The executives responded. A fracking king named Harold Hamm (who had originally supported Ron DeSantis in the primaries) took the lead, working the phones assiduously. “Harold can just stick his finger in the ground, and oil will come up,” an admiring Trump explained at one event. But in this case he stuck his finger in his phone and what came up was money. The Post again: “Hamm is working ‘incredibly hard to raise as much money as he can from the energy sector,’ said a Trump campaign aide. ‘We’ve gotten max-out checks from people we’ve never gotten a dollar from before.’ ”
As I say, no one seems to shake their head at any of that anymore. It’s corrupt, but a kind of corruption legalized by the Supreme Court, in Citizens United and other decisions; we’re beginning to take it for granted that government power will be used on behalf of the highest bidder.
The corruption of language, however, is slightly different. Trump—a master at directing the focus where he wants it to be—also used Monday’s signing sessions to declare a “national energy emergency.” This, one aide says, will “unlock a variety of different authorities” that let him make these changes more easily—but the main effect is simply to muddy the waters. Because there is no energy emergency. America has been producing oil and gas at record levels—indeed, oil-industry players have been pointing out, in the past few weeks, that they don’t really want to see more drilling, as that would drive prices down. (Trump’s executive orders, by halting the leasing of federal waters for offshore wind farms, would effectively limit the amount of energy the country could potentially generate.)
This energy emergency supposedly stems from a need to provide more power to data centers, so that we can beat China in developing the grail of artificial intelligence. “The national-energy emergency is crucial because we are in an A.I. race with China, and our ability to produce domestic American energy is so crucial such that we can generate the electricity and power that’s needed to stay at the global forefront of technology,” a Trump official, speaking not for attribution to reporters, said, on the morning of the Inauguration.
But—all doubts about the utility and urgency of developing A.I. aside—if this were the new Administration’s real goal it would actually want to leave fossil fuels behind. At the end of 2024, a Silicon Valley team that included researchers from Stripe, Anthropic, Tesla, and elsewhere produced a report showing that solar microgrids are by far the fastest way to build the power that data centers need. “Estimated time to operation for a large off-grid solar microgrid could be around 2 years (1-2 years for site acquisition and permitting plus 1-2 years for site buildout), though there’s no obvious reason why this couldn’t be done faster by very motivated and competent builders,” the report states. That’s because essentially all you have to do is put up a bunch of solar panels and some batteries and run a wire to your data center—not build a huge centralized power plant and connect it to the grid. The report continues, “Off-grid solar microgrids offer a fast path to power AI datacenters at enormous scale. The tech is mature, the suitable parcels of land in the US Southwest are known, and this solution is likely faster than most, if not all, alternatives.”
The actual emergency, obviously, is with the climate. The past two years were the hottest ever recorded. In 2023, Canadian fires filled American skies with choking smoke; 2024 saw Hurricane Helene devastate southern Appalachia; 2025 dawned with the Los Angeles inferno. For years, activists tried to persuade Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency, mostly in an effort to focus attention and action on the crisis. Biden instead worked hard to build out clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act, virtuous work that got him, and the climate crisis, almost no attention at all.
So now we find ourselves at an Orwellian moment, almost a Seussian one. Our leader has declared a fake emergency about energy, so that we can do more of something—drilling for oil and gas—that causes the actual emergency now devastating our second most populous city. It’s entirely possible that Trump’s gambit will succeed in confusing voters, and it’s almost certain that it will confuse much of the media, which has a history of following whatever squirrel he lets out of the cage.
But it’s unlikely that he will fool the Chinese, who are building renewable energy faster than anyone. And it is almost certain he will fail to confuse the planet’s glaciers and ice caps, which will go on melting, or its forests and grasslands, which will go on burning, or its seas, which will go on rising. When we want to describe the folly of our leaders, we often invoke the example of King Canute, smiting the sea with his sceptre to hold back the waves. Canute, however, was wilier than our usual version of the legend—he was actually trying to show his flattering courtiers that there were limits to his power. The twelfth-century English historian Henry of Huntingdon says that, as the water swept past, Canute declared, “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix and never wore it again, “to the honor of God the almighty King.”
Trump, of course, is delivering the opposite of that pious and humble message. He confuses attention with reality (just as Biden sometimes confused reality with attention). It’s an emergency all right.
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