“This June construction began on a wind-powered underwater data center about six miles off the coast of Shanghai, one of China’s AI hubs…

Undersea data centers use pipes to pump seawater through a radiator on the back of server racks to absorb heat and carry it away. Hailanyun—the company sometimes referred to as HiCloud that is behind the Shanghai data center—says an assessment conducted with the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology shows its project uses at least 30 percent less electricity than on-land data centers, thanks to natural cooling.

The Shanghai center will also be connected to a nearby offshore wind farm that is set to supply 97 percent of its energy, says Hailanyun spokesperson Li Langping.

The project’s first phase is designed to contain 198 server racks—enough to hold 396 to 792 AI-capable servers—and is slated to begin operation in September, Li says. It is expected to provide enough computing power to complete the equivalent of training GPT-3.5—the large language model that OpenAI released in 2022 and used to fine-tune ChatGPT—in the space of a day, he adds. Yet Hailanyun’s Shanghai center is small compared with a typical land-based one: a medium-scale data center in China normally has up to 3,000 standard racks, while a superscale version can contain more than 10,000.”

From Scientific American.