China has put 2,000 servers in sea near Shanghai, taking off from a Microsoft project that shutdown in 2020, where the company sank 855 servers in North Sea

China's 24MW underwater data centre off Shanghai runs 2,000 servers cooled by seawater and powered by an offshore wind farm, six years after Microsoft pulled 855 servers out of the North Sea and shelved the idea. Commercial operations began in May, after trials in February and construction wrapping up last October.The design it borrows from belongs to Microsoft. In a land-based facility, somewhere between a quarter and half of total electricity demand goes to moving chilled water around the servers. Training clusters are pushing density past what ordinary buildings can handle, and grid operators in Virginia and Texas have started resisting new data centre connections. Around 90% of the world's AI data centre capacity now sits in those two countries.

Source: Times of India September 13, 2026 09:10 UTC