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The deployment sits within Hainan’s free-trade zone, where China has relaxed regulations to allow full foreign ownership of data center and telecom operations. The project supports Hainan’s push to become a maritime and tech innovation hub, integrating marine science, digital services, and offshore infrastructure.
China’s Hainan underwater data center is a monumental experiment—one embedded with technological ambition, sustainability goals, and geopolitical strategy. While challenges abound—from marine maintenance to cost structures—the potential upside in cooling efficiency, infrastructure scalability, and carbon reduction is profound.
It is regarded as a special area for China to comprehensively deepen economic reform and experiment with the highest level of opening-up policies. Hainan Free Trade Port is not a seaport in the usual sense, but the entire Hainan Island is regarded as a special economic development area.
The "Notice on Preferential Corporate Income Tax Policies for Hainan Free Trade Port" proposed that enterprises in encouraged industries registered and operated in Hainan Free Trade Port shall be subject to a reduced corporate income tax rate of 15%.
In June 2020, China released a master plan to build the whole of Hainan Island into a globally influential and high-level free trade port by the middle of the century. Series of opening-up policies have been issued to create a "foreign investor-friendly" business environment in Hainan.
* China's Hainan Free Trade Port (FTP) will officially launch an island-wide independent customs operation on Dec. 18, 2025, which marks the anniversary of the milestone Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee in 1978 that ushered in the reform and opening-up, underscores China's unwavering commitment to high-standard opening-up.
The Catalogue of Encouraged Industries in the Hainan Free Trade Port (2024 Edition), which came into effect on 1 March 2024, specifies that in addition to those categories receiving encouragement under existing national industrial catalogues, Hainan will have 14 more industries receiving such treatment, creating a total of 176 types.
An aerial drone photo shows a duty-free shopping mall in Sanya, South China's Hainan province, May 29, 2025. [Photo/Xinhua] The Hainan Free Trade Port will launch island-wide independent customs operations on Dec 18, a key step in transforming the tropical island into a globally significant free trade hub, a senior official announced Wednesday.
Faced with energy transition objectives, the ten countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have technology options to decarbonize power sector. This study investigates the hypothetical decarbonization pathways for ASEAN’s power sector.
To facilitate investments in renewables in ASEAN, it is critical to overcoming the barriers in renewable energy legislation, energy governance, and business environment. 28 Cooperation through the ASEAN Power Grid brings economic benefits to the region as a whole, and thus improves the affordability for energy transition.
Here, we present an integrated power system capacity expansion model for ASEAN over 2018 – 2050. The results provide hypothetical pathways to decarbonize the ASEAN power sector while meeting the projected electricity demand by strategically pursuing renewable energy, carbon capture and sequestration, and cross-border transmission grids.
While fossil fuels dominate ASEAN power mix (accounting for 76%), hydroelectricity infrastructures are well developed in the region, providing 17% of the electricity. Other renewables account for the remaining 7% of the electricity production.
