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Chinese Province To Move Data Centres Under The Sea

Guangdong province, a major tech hub on the southeast coast, plans to move some big data centres to new sites under the sea in a bid to cut energy use, according to a plan published on Tuesday


This is a 2018 picture of a data centre that Tencent was building in Guizhou. Huawei also saw hollowed out hills in Guizhou as cool and secure sites for data centres. Facebook has data centres in Sweden, near the Arctic Circle because of the need to keep centres cool. AFP pic.

 

China’s Guangdong province, a major technology hub on the southeast coast, plans to move some of its big data centres to new sites under the sea in a bid to cut energy use, according to plan published on Tuesday.

Data centres have emerged as one of the biggest industrial consumers of energy. Building them underwater will reduce the need for cooling technology, which can account for around a third of a facility’s total electricity consumption.

Major cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Zhuhai will be encouraged to relocate “high energy consuming data centres” to underwater locations, the five-year marine economy development plan said.

The provincial government will lend support for related technological breakthroughs, it added.

The plan comes on the heels of efforts by the southern Chinese island province of Hainan, which has commenced work on the world’s first undersea commercial data centre aiming to complete it in five years.

 

Microsoft Trial

In 2018, Microsoft lowered a non-commercial data centre the size of a truck about 35 metres (117 feet) into the sea off Britain. The miniature data centre was retrieved last year, and Microsoft declared the experiment a success.

Greenpeace has warned that electricity consumption from China’s data centres and 5G base stations is set to almost quadruple from 2020 to 2035, making the sector one of the fastest growing sources of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

Environmentalists have also expressed concern, however, about the impact of higher water temperatures and noise pollution from undersea data centres on surrounding marine life.

China’s industry ministry said this year it would urge data centres to make full use of renewable energy and encourage them to build their own renewable power plants.

 

• Reuters with additional editing by Jim Pollard

 

 

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Beijing Warns On ‘Disorderly’ Building Of Data Centres

 

AF TV – Three reasons why China is facing a power crunch

 

China speeds up construction of data centres

 

China and Huawei move data centres into hollowed-out hills

 

 

 

Jim Pollard

Jim Pollard is an Australian journalist based in Thailand since 1999. He worked for News Ltd papers in Sydney, Perth, London and Melbourne before travelling through SE Asia in the late 90s. He was a senior editor at The Nation for 17+ years.