At the start of the 2026 summer, a new data center was announced in China. It wasn’t built near a bustling city or on a computing campus stretching hundreds of acres. Rather, the data center was off the coast of Shanghai in the East China Sea.
The submerged center is wind-powered, and a government press release boasts that it is the world's first underwater wind-powered data center. It’s meant to be more environmentally friendly than the land versions.
But climate change may influence whether underwater data centers become commonplace. Data centers need cold water to cool the servers, and ocean temperatures have been steadily increasing since the 1950s, according to NASA. Rising ocean temperatures could reduce the cooling efficiency of underwater data centers.
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Submerging Data Centers to Keep Cool
Dropping data centers to ocean depths seems like a tempting solution. Data centers gobble up so much electricity and water that their energy demands already equal the airline industry, according to a study in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. By 2030, it is estimated that these centers will surpass 20 percent of global energy demand.
More than half of the world’s population lives near a coastline, so in the mid-2010s, Microsoft engineers experimented with an underwater data center, according to reporting from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The thinking was that the data center would be close enough to serve nearby communities without hogging the electrical and water supplies.
Explore All OptionsIn their experiment, the engineers submerged a data center off the coast of Scotland in the spring of 2018. When they raised it during the autumn of 2020, they deemed it a success and highlighted several benefits not available on land. The airtight canister meant the servers weren’t getting dusty and no one was bumping into them on the way to the break room.
Despite calling the experiment a success, Microsoft has not announced any plans to repeat the project in the last six years.
Are Ocean Waters Getting Too Warm to Cool Data Centers?
Data centers need cool water to cool the servers. But ocean temperatures have been rising. Would these servers work during a marine heatwave?
“At higher temperatures, cooling is still possible, but the effectiveness reduces for servers with high utilization,” Ayodele Periola, a senior lecturer in the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, told Discover.
In a 2022 study in Scientific Reports, Periola and a team of engineers proposed using a cold-water reservoir to ensure cold-water availability during marine heat waves.
“I would consider that temperatures below 19 degrees Celsius (66 degrees Fahrenheit) are suitable for realizing warm cooling,” Periola said.
At temperatures above 66 degrees, the data center would need to rely on a cold-water reservoir to maintain efficiency.
Data Centers Could Increase Water Temps
The Microsoft engineering team had proposed placing underwater data centers near coastal areas to serve local populations. But these coastal areas are shallower, and they are increasingly spending weeks or even months well above 66 degrees.
In early August 2026, for example, sensors recorded water temperatures well above the recommended 66 degrees. On the Atlantic Coast, Nantucket was at 78 degrees; Portland, Maine, at 68.7 degrees; and Newport, Rhode Island, at 74.5 degrees, according to the National Centers for Environmental Data, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Further down the coast, water temperatures reached the mid-80s near Virginia and the Carolinas. In southern Florida, temperatures were close to 90 degrees. Over in the Great Lakes, sensors in Lake Superior showed temperatures in the 50s, but gauges in the other four Great Lakes were in the high sixties and low seventies.
And if data centers do get dunked, they may make these waters even warmer. The same 2022 study in Scientific Reports found that when data centers intake warm water, they release water at a higher temperature. Researchers would need to evaluate how the hot water could affect nearby marine life.
Submerged data centers might make life better on land, but they could also make life harder underwater.
Read More: AI Data Centers Come With a Hidden Environmental Cost — Is Sustainability Possible?
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from a study published in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems: Artificial intelligence and the environment: ethical challenges and strategic opportunities for organizations
- This article references information from The State Council of the People's Republic of China: China completes construction of world's first wind-powered underwater data center
- This article references information from NASA: Ocean Warming - Earth Indicator
- This article references information from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Want an Energy-Efficient Data Center? Build It Underwater
- This article references information from Microsoft: Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably
- This article references information from a study published in Scientific Reports: Heat Wave Resilient Systems Architecture for Underwater Data Centers
- This article references information from NOAA: Coastal Water Temperature Guide Home Northern Atlantic Coast
