Monday, 17 August 2026

China's wind-powered underwater data center in Shanghai reached full commercial operation in May 2026, fourteen months after its June 2025 launch, The Conversation reported.

The build carried a price tag of US$226 million. Instead of refrigerating fresh water to cool its computers, the site draws on seawater, cutting electricity use by at least 30% against conventional data centers, according to The Conversation.

One large operator already walked away from the concept. Microsoft sank a sealed server unit onto the seafloor off Scotland's Orkney Islands in 2018, wired to shore by cable and holding 864 servers, The Conversation reported. Two years of operation produced a failure rate roughly one-eighth that of comparable installations on land. Microsoft closed the project in 2024 and declined to build further submerged sites.

Other developers have kept going with seawater cooling. Keppel started construction in 2026 on a four-story floating data center in Singapore, due to open in 2028, that will use seawater to cool its equipment, The Conversation reported. Planning work in Ulsan, South Korea, dates to 2025 for a submerged facility sized for more than 100,000 servers and projected to consume 30% less power than land-based equivalents through seawater cooling.

Siting resistance on land shapes the calculation. Gallup polling in March 2026 recorded 70% of Americans opposed to AI data centers in their own communities, The Conversation reported.

Sunrun has signed an agreement with distributed energy resource platform Voltus to feed residential battery capacity into Voltus's Bring Your Own Capacity programs for AI hyperscalers, the residential storage and solar provider said in an announcement.

Under the arrangement, Sunrun will supply energy capacity drawn from a portion of its residential storage-plus-solar systems located in the PJM and MISO grid regions, which the company said would help deliver flexible power against rising electricity demand.

Sunrun described itself in the announcement as America's largest provider of residential battery storage, solar, and home-to-grid power plants, and Voltus as a leading distributed energy resource platform.

The financing route is the notable part of the structure. "In collaboration with Voltus, we are providing critical capacity from home batteries supported by funding from hyperscalers," said Sunrun CEO Mary Powell. That places data center operators, rather than utilities or ratepayers, as the funding counterparty for aggregated household assets.

The Voltus deal follows a separate initiative by Sunrun with Renew Home and Tesla aimed at unlocking more than 16.8 GW of flexible capacity from home batteries, solar, smart thermostats and electric vehicles, according to the announcement.

A peer-reviewed study published last week found that if AI is taken up at similar rates in the fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors, the net result is an annual emissions increase of 0.47 to 1.8 gigatonnes of CO2, according to Climate Home News.

The finding cuts against the argument that AI deployment pays for its own energy footprint through efficiency gains elsewhere. The study measures the two effects against each other and reports that the fossil side wins on net.

Data centre emissions are small today. Climate Home News reported that greenhouse gas emissions from data centres now stand at less than 1% of the global total, and are set to rise.

The electricity side moves faster than the emissions share suggests. Data centre power use is projected by 2030 to reach nearly three times the combined annual consumption of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria, according to Climate Home News.

The reporting also traces the accountability fight inside the industry. Holly Alpine and her husband Will, both Microsoft managers, quit their jobs in 2024 and launched a campaign to hold Big Tech accountable for the emissions its technology enables.

Their target is the enabled-emissions question rather than the direct footprint of the servers: the emissions that follow when the technology is sold into fossil fuel operations. That framing lines up with the study's mechanism, in which parallel adoption across both sectors produces a net rise rather than a wash.