The first cabin of China's commercial undersea data center was launched in Lingshui Li Autonomous County, south China's Hainan Province on Friday.

The data center, the first of its kind in the world for commercial use, consists of a shore station, underwater relay station, underwater data terminal and submarine cables. The relay station and the data terminal will be deployed on the designated target seabed.

Its submarine data compartment, the core equipment, is in the shape of a cylindrical tank with a diameter of 3.6 meters and a weight of 1,300 tonnes, equivalent to the weight of 1,000 cars.

With a design life of 25 years, the compartment can provide a safe and sealed oxygen-free environment with constant humidity and pressure at a depth of over 30 meters.

Placing servers in the sealed data compartments on the seabed can take seawater as a natural cooling source, contributing to outperformance in saving electricity, water and land sources, and high security, strong computing capability and rapid deployment.

Using ambient water as a natural cooling source for its equipment "can help save more than 30 percent on energy costs versus traditional data centers. Without needing to prepare water for cooling purposes, the idea of an undersea data center therefore saves on costs associated with such contingencies, with about 30,000 cubic meters of water saved per megawatt each year," China Daily reported citing the builder of the data center, Beijing Highlander Digital Technology Co., Ltd.

The construction of an undersea data center was put forward in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for marine economic development of Hainan Province, and a total of 100 data cabins will be set up.

It has filled in a void in the country's integrated development of new infrastructure of marine engineering and data centers. So far, nine companies have signed contracts with the data center.

China piloted its first undersea big data cabinet in Zhuhai, south China's Guangzhou Province in January 2021.

In 2018, Microsoft lowered a non-commercial data center the size of a truck about 35 meters into the sea off Britain. The miniature data center was retrieved in 2020, and Microsoft declared the experiment a success.

Read more: China starts building world's first commercial undersea data center