A new data centre capsule was added to an existing energy efficient data processing cluster near China’s southernmost Hainan island on Tuesday, state broadcaster CCTV said.
The addition boosted the computing power of the submerged cluster to the equivalent of 30,000 high-end gaming computers operating simultaneously and could support 7,000 conversations per second with the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek, CCTV reported.
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Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
It said the cluster, which is run by the start-up Shenzhen Hicloud Data Centre Technology, could complete tasks in one second that would take a conventional computer a year, with the computing power to be used in AI model training, game production and marine science research.
The waterproof data units use seawater as a natural cooling source to improve computing efficiency and save land, fresh water and electricity in what is an otherwise energy-intensive sector.
In 2023, CCTV said servers in data centres, which emit a great amount of heat energy during computing and storage processes, used to be cooled using air conditioning and other refrigeration systems, which consume a lot of electricity.
The installation of the new unit comes as tech rivalry between China and the United States heats up, particularly with DeepSeek grabbing global attention last month with a powerful AI model it says was created at a significantly lower cost than other models.
