(Yicai) April 17 -- Chinese marine information service provider Highlander Digital Technology will construct the world’s first undersea smart computing center off southern Hainan island to meet the rising demand for computing power in the era of artificial intelligence.

Highlander will build a supercomputing cluster of more than 2,000 petaFlops, or 2 quintillion floating-point operations per second, based on its existing undersea data center in Lingshui Li autonomous county that has been in operation for over a year, the Beijing-based company said yesterday in Haikou, capital of Hainan province.

The smart computing center will have high-power-density AI servers to support fields such as AI model training, education and scientific research, film and television production as well as deep-sea exploration, the specialist in ship navigation, ocean exploration and undersea data centers said.

The hub will be a model of green and low-carbon infrastructure, said Highlander, which was formed in 2001. It will use seawater as a natural cooling source all year round and be powered by renewable energy.

Highlander expects its net loss to narrow by as much as 90 percent last year from the year before to CNY80 million (USD11.1 million) and revenue to jump by up to 31 percent to CNY950 million (USD131.2 million) thanks to the improved performance of the shipping industry, according to the firm’s latest earnings forecast.

Editor: Kim Taylor