(ECNS) -- China's first undersea data center (UDC) was unveiled in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province on Sunday.
The UDC project involves installing Internet facilities like servers in airtight pressure vessels with excellent cooling performance under the ocean surface.
These facilities are powered by subsea composite cables and then transmit data to the Internet.
UDC has the advantage of energy and resources saving by cooling off Internet facilities with a huge amount of circulating seawater.
The biggest bottleneck to data center development is energy consumption. It consumes too much power and cannot be halted for a second. Seawater can be used to reduce energy consumption by about 30 percent, said Xu Tan, vice president of Highlander.
A big data center, with an annual economic volume exceeding 300 billion yuan, is vital to new infrastructure, Xu added.
Currently, most big data centers are built on land, occupying a large amount of space and consuming excessive power and cooling water.
Therefore, it is scientifically most effective to further utilize marine space and deploy China's coastal data centers in offshore waters, Xu said.
UDC is primarily powered by urban industrial power, supplemented by renewable energies like offshore wind, solar and tidal energy, and features low cost, short latency, high reliability and safety.
It is calculated that servers contained within the data center could prove up to eight times more reliable than their dry-land counterparts.
