World's first underwater data center

 China starts operations of world's first underwater data center 

China has begun operations of the world's first undersea data center directly powered by offshore wind, as the country races to solve the soaring energy demands of artificial intelligence with greener and more efficient infrastructure. Project combines renewable energy and AI-focused digital infrastructure. The Shanghai Lingang undersea data center demonstration project, built by a subsidiary of China Communications Construction, officially entered operation in the waters off Shanghai's eastern coast. Just over seven months from completing phase one of this mega-project, Chinese engineers have finished the build and switched on the world's first underwater data center (UDC) powered by offshore wind turbines. What's more, it doesn't need freshwater and cuts land use by more than 90% compared with above-ground centers.

The project combines offshore engineering, renewable energy and AI-focused digital infrastructure in a model Chinese officials and engineers describe as a potential template for next-generation computing systems. Located about 10 km's offshore in Shanghai's Lingang area, the project has a planned capacity of 24 megawatts, which is enough to power roughly 20,000 households. According to state media, the center is currently operating at 2.3 MW. This "room to move" is essentially future-proofing the UDC's usefulness, as companies turn their attention from initial builds to longevity when it comes to hardware upgrades and compute capacity. It was reported on the big build earlier, when the first stage had been constructed. At the time, there was no projected timeline for it to become operational. The underwater infrastructure, off the coast of Shanghai in the Lin-hang Special Area, was officially switched on recently, and it's far more impressive than it may sound on paper.

Its core innovation is what developers call a "direct offshore wind connection" model. Electricity generated by offshore wind farms is transmitted directly to submerged data modules through subsea photoelectric composite cables, bypassing traditional grid-routing systems. The system also uses seawater as a natural cooling source through a circulating copper-pipe heat exchange design, reducing electricity consumption by 22.8%, eliminating freshwater use entirely and cutting land usage by more than 90%. This center, built by a subsidiary of China Communications Construction, uses a circulating copper-pipe heat exchange system that reportedly reduces electricity consumption. Offshore wind farms are also estimated to generate 95% of the electricity needed to run its 192 server racks across four levels, significantly reducing reliance on existing power infrastructure. "For an undersea data center of the same scale, the electricity used for cooling would only account for about one-tenth of total power consumption," Tsinghua University Professor Li Zhen said. "If data centers of the same scale were placed underwater, even allowing extra margins, cooling consumption could fall to around 30-billion kW. That would save about 50 billion kWh of electricity each year."

The move is not only an engineering breakthrough, but also a paradigm shift in the relationship between computing power, energy and geographic space in China, industry experts said. The launch comes as China's AI boom fuels a rapid rise in demand for low-latency, high-density computing infrastructure. Shanghai has become one of China's leading AI hubs, home to large-model developers, autonomous driving firms, biotech companies, fintech groups and advanced manufacturing enterprises, industries where milliseconds can determine commercial performance. Data centers don’t need freshwater to function, but it remains the simplest cooling option, as it puts fewer demands on surrounding infrastructure, thanks to its lower levels of salts, minerals and biological impurities which can corrode pipes or reduce cooling efficiency over time. Unlike many inland facilities that still rely on freshwater, UDCs instead use the surrounding ocean as a heat sink, transferring this heat through sealed cooling systems.

The project also reflects a growing global scramble to tackle the energy and cooling crisis facing AI infrastructure. Data centers have become one of the world's fastest-growing electricity consumers as companies expand AI model training and inference capacity. Cooling alone accounts for a large share of energy consumption in conventional data centers, particularly in densely populated urban markets. Nonetheless, while UDCs may reduce freshwater demands and land use, underwater computing is still a largely unknown at commercial scale. Questions remain around how these facilities will endure, and what the ecological effects of continuously releasing heat into local marine environments might be. But considering tech companies are racing to put data centers in space to meet rising demand, real-world projects like China's UDC could serve as valuable test cases in the AI age, revealing whether moving computing infrastructure into new environments can offset existing land-based issues, or reveal entirely new ones.

Tsinghua University Professor Li Zhen said conventional data centers typically use about one-third of their total electricity consumption on cooling systems. China's data centers currently consume around 250 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, with roughly 80 billion kWh used for environmental cooling. It is estimated that the reduction would be equivalent to not burning roughly 15 million metric tons of standard coal annually, significantly lowering carbon emissions. Globally, major technology companies are searching for new ways to reduce the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure as model sizes and inference demand expand rapidly. The combination of offshore renewable power and seawater cooling could become increasingly attractive in coastal markets where land, electricity and freshwater resources are constrained. For China, Li said, the country that has built the world's largest manufacturing supply chains is now attempting to build a new generation of industrial infrastructure for the AI era, one where electricity, cooling and computing are engineered as a single integrated system beneath the sea. Others can also get lead from it.

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Venus with unusual facts

 Reality of Venus with some interesting facts 

Almost all planets in the Solar System spin anti-clockwise on their axis and orbit the Sun in an anti-clockwise direction. Venus also orbits the Sun anti-clockwise but spins clockwise on its axis. One theory for this unusual  rotation is that it was knocked off its upright position earlier in its history! The only other planet in the Solar System to spin clockwise is Uranus. Astronomers believe that at some point, a colliding celestial body tilted Venus so far off its original position that it is now upside down. The only other planet to spin in a weird direction is Uranus, which spins on its side, probably the result of another collision early on in its life. The clouds of sulphuric acid in Venus’ atmosphere make it reflective and shiny, obscuring our view of its surface. Its brightness makes it visible even during the day, if it’s clear and you know where to look.

A Venusian day is about 243 Earth days, while a Venusian year lasts about 225, and because the planet rotates backwards compared with Earth and most other planets, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to turn once on its axis. It takes about 225 Earth days to circle the Sun. On those figures a single rotation outlasts a whole Venusian year, which is the basis for the popular line that a day on Venus is longer than a year. Venus is hotter than Mercury, despite being further away from the Sun. Its mean temperature is 462°C. This is because of the high concentration of CO2 in Venus’ atmosphere, which works to produce an intense greenhouse effect. Heat is trapped in the atmosphere like a blanket, causing the temperature of the planet to be much higher than its proximity to the Sun would suggest.

“Day” can mean two things, and on Venus they are nowhere near each other. The first is the rotation period, the time the planet takes to spin once relative to the distant stars. Astronomers call this the sidereal day. On Venus it runs to about 243 Earth days, and according to NASA’s Venus fact sheet that is indeed longer than the planet’s 225-day orbit. The second is the solar day, the time from one sunrise to the next. That is the day you would actually live through, and on Venus it lasts about 117 Earth days. A little over half a Venusian year. The Sun comes up, sets and comes up again roughly twice in every trip around the Sun. NASA’s Space Place makes the consequence concrete: because the Sun rises only about every 117 Earth days, it rises close to twice during a single Venusian year, even though, by the rotation count, it is still the same long day.

Venus has 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth. That’s about the same as the pressure found at a depth of 1km in the Earth's oceans. It is thought that Venus was named after the beautiful Roman goddess (counterpart to the Greek Aphrodite) due to its bright, shining appearance in the sky. Of the five planets known to ancient astronomers, it would have been the brightest. Venus rotates backwards. Most planets in the Solar System, Earth included, spin in the same direction they orbit, west to east, which is why our Sun rises in the east. Venus turns the other way. Stand on its surface, somehow, and the Sun would come up in the west and go down in the east. That reverse spin is also what pulls the solar day so far below the sidereal day. As Venus moves around its orbit, its slow backward rotation brings the Sun back to the same point in the sky sooner than a forward spin would. Venus was the first planet to have its motions plotted across the sky, as early as the second millennium BC. Because Venus is easy to spot with the naked eye, it is impossible to say who discovered the planet. But over the centuries we have been able to measure Venus’ motions, including the rare transit of Venus, when the planet appears to cross in front of the Sun.

The thick atmosphere would change the experience further. Venus is wrapped in dense cloud, so any sunrise at the surface would be a slow brightening rather than a sharp event at the horizon. The surface itself, at about 465 degrees Celsius and under crushing pressure, is not somewhere you would linger to watch it. How Venus ended up with a slow backward spin is an open question, not a solved one. One line of thinking points to a large impact early in the planet’s history, the kind of collision which could knock a young planet’s rotation off course and even reverse it. Another points to the atmosphere: solar heating drives strong atmospheric tides in Venus’s dense air, and over a very long time these may have braked the spin and helped tip it into reverse. Both are hypotheses. Neither is confirmed, and there is no agreement on which mattered more, or whether both played a part. What is measured, rather than inferred, is the rotation rate itself. Earth-based radar observations have pinned Venus’s sidereal day at close to 243 Earth days, while also showing that the exact spin period can vary by tens of minutes, likely because the dense atmosphere exchanges angular momentum with the solid planet.

Following the rules of Latin, we should say ‘venerean’ as the adjective to describe things related to Venus. However, this is deemed to be too close to the word ‘venereal’. The more commonly used word is ‘Venusian’ despite its clunky etymology. Venus does take longer to spin once than to complete one orbit, and it is the only planet in the Solar System for which that is true. But the day you would live through there is shorter than the year, a little over half of it. Venus does not hold a single sunrise across more than a year. It turns slowly, and backwards, and so the Sun comes up twice between one Venusian New Year and the next.

Muhammad (Peace be upon him) Name