Alibaba's QianDao Lake Data Center Uses Deep Lake Water Cooling to Achieve Ultra‑Low PUE and Record Water‑Use Efficiency

On September 8, Alibaba's new data center at QianDao Lake in Zhejiang began operations, using a closed‑loop system that circulates deep lake water through the facility to cool servers, then returns the water to the lake via a 2.5‑km channel that also serves as a city landscape feature.

Because the lake’s deep water maintains a constant temperature of about 17 °C, the center can operate without external cooling energy for roughly 90% of the time, cutting cooling energy consumption by more than 80%.

The facility boasts a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) below 1.3 on average, with a minimum recorded PUE of 1.17, saving tens of millions of kilowatt‑hours of electricity annually and reducing carbon emissions by over ten thousand tons of standard coal.

Water‑use efficiency (WUE) reaches 0.197, surpassing the previous best record of 0.28 set by Facebook’s Oregon data center, making it the most water‑efficient data center in China.

Designed to meet Alibaba Cloud and big‑data workloads, the center is built to Tier 4 standards and is the largest single‑site data center in Zhejiang.

In addition to the lake‑water cooling, the center incorporates renewable energy sources such as photovoltaic solar panels and hydroelectric generation, and recycles server waste heat for office heating.

Dynamic environmental management uses intelligent algorithms to monitor server power and temperature in real time, adjusting cooling output to minimize energy use.

Alibaba’s custom hardware includes Data Center Modules (manufactured in 45 days, saving four months versus traditional solutions), AliRack 2.0 full‑height servers that increase rack density by 30% and double storage capacity, and PCIe‑based AliFlash SSDs that boost IOPS 5‑10× and cut latency by 70%.

The launch supports Alibaba’s rapid growth in cloud computing and big‑data services, following a 60‑billion‑yuan investment in Alibaba Cloud and a 106% revenue increase in Q1 2016.