Chinese company Highlander is building a server pod near Shanghai, where it will be submerged underwater to reduce the power consumption used by the facility for cooling. According to the South China Morning Post, Highlander is expected to sink the underwater pods in October. The servers will operate commercially, with state-owned institutions like China Telecom being among the first customers.
This isn’t the first underwater data center project; Microsoft concluded its own experiment off the coast of Scotland in 2024. Although Microsoft said that it has learned a lot from the project, it did not proceed with a commercial deployment of the system.
