World’s First Offshore Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center Begins Operations Off Shanghai

The world’s first wind-powered underwater data center, connected to an offshore wind farm, has become operational off China’s Lingang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone.

The project, said to be one of the first of its kind, was launched in 2025 after a cooperation agreement was signed between the administrative committee of the Lingang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, Shanghai Lingang Special Area Investment Holding Group, and HiCloud Technology.

It was being developed in two phases, with the first phase focusing on building a massive demonstration facility with a 2.3 MW capacity, which has been scaled to 24 MW through the second phase.

In October 2025, the Chinese government announced that the construction of “the world’s first wind-powered underwater data center (UDC) project” was completed, with the project providing “a demonstration for the green and low-carbon development of computing infrastructure and for the local consumption of offshore wind power.”

The data centre lies 10 m underwater, between the first and second phases of the
Lin-gang’s offshore wind farm.

The UDC modules have been placed near offshore wind turbines, enabling them to use seawater for cooling and electricity supplied directly by the wind farm.

The system decreases electricity use by 22.8%, does away with excessive water consumption and also cuts land use by over 90%.

The facility’s power usage effectiveness is around 1.15, which is among industry-leading levels.

The GPU servers within the underwater modules support data annotation and the development of domestic large language models (LLMs), while allowing for a coordinated allocation of computing resources between offshore and onshore facilities.

Computing clusters from companies, including China Telecom, have been deployed, alongside local computing service providers such as LinkWise.