A newly-upgraded data module was placed on the sea floor and joined the computing equipment put there before into an underwater artificial intelligence cluster, which was smoothly started at Lingshui, south China's Hainan Province on Tuesday, marking the launch of an underwater intelligent computing center.
The newly placed module, measuring 18 meters in length and 3.6 meters in diameter, accommodates servers which could complete in one second what ordinary computers would calculate in a whole year.
"What are loaded on our module this time are mainly high-performance graphics processing units. In terms of its computing power, it is capable of handling up to 7,000 intelligent conversations per second, including queries and replies. It can be mainly applied to scientific computing, industrial calculation and simulation analysis, and of course some model building, like the establishment of exploration data and big data," said Pu Ding, general manager of the Hainan underwater intelligent computing center project.
From the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, three sets of data center modules, with a total volume of more than 1,000 general-purpose servers, were put into the seabed, mainly to meet clients' computing and storage needs.
In 2024, one of the data center modules was salvaged and upgraded, before it was placed back on the sea floor on Tuesday, to form a powerful computing cluster underwater.
The intelligent computing center cluster uses seawater as a natural cooling source, which can save a lot of land, freshwater and electricity.
Now its operator has signed contracts with some 10 companies. The devices will be applied to large-scale artificial intelligence model training and reasoning, industrial simulation, game production, and marine scientific research.
South China's island province launches undersea intelligent computing center
