An offshore wind-powered underwater data center off the coast of Shanghai, China, has reached full commercial operations.

According to recent reports, the data center cost an estimated $226 million to construct, as part of a partnership between the Chinese government and HiCloud Technology, a private engineering contractor specializing in subsea data centers, alongside state-backed telecom providers including China Telecom.

The project has a capacity of 24MW and is located in Shanghai's Lingang Special Area. It was officially launched in June 2025, completed in October, and began full commercial operations last week following successful initial trials in February.

The servers are sealed inside pressure-resistant modules deployed approximately 35 meters (114 feet) below the surface, using the surrounding seawater as a passive cooling system in place of the chillers and HVAC systems typical of land-based facilities. Chinese media reports claim the facility achieves a PUE below 1.15.

The data center draws a substantial portion of its power from nearby offshore wind farms, tying renewable generation directly into its operations.

The project is part of a larger plan by HiCloud to build a large-scale underwater data center powered by offshore wind, which could total up to 500MW of capacity.

HiCloud is a division of Highlander, which has previously developed what it describes as the world’s first underwater data center modules off the coast of Hainan Province, China.

The company first experimented with underwater data centers in 2021 with a deployment off the coast of Hainan Island. It followed this up with its first commercial deployment in 2023. In February 2025, HiCloud added a further data center module to its Hainan UDC cluster, containing 400 high-performance servers.

Other companies have tried to sink data centers into the ocean, most notably Microsoft, which launched the world's first underwater data center, dubbed Project Natick, off the Pacific coast of the US in 2015. It followed this up with another pilot project off the coast of Orkney in the North Sea in 2018. However, last year, DCD confirmed that the cloud giant had abandoned its undersea endeavors.

More recent projects include Panthalassa, which last month, unveiled a floating data center platform dubbed Ocean-3. Before this, floating wind firm Aikido announced its entrance into the data center space with the launch of a floating offshore wind platform integrated with a modular AI-focused data center.

Underwater and offshore deployments do come with notable engineering hurdles, including saltwater corrosion, pressure sealing over time, and the logistical difficulty of replacing failed hardware.