Less than a week to the Alibaba Cloud x TiDB AI Innovation Night - and seats are filling up fast! From agentic AI and AI-ready data infrastructure to real-world deployment strategies and measurable ROI, hear how enterprises are turning AI ambition into business impact. Connect with industry leaders and peers over an evening of conversations, networking, dinner, drinks, and a few surprise elements along the way. Register now: Lumen #AlibabaCloudSG# #AlibabaCloudPartner# #AlibabaCloud# #AI# #DigitalTransformation# #LLM# #Qwen# #Wan# #ContentCreation# #DigitalUpskilling# #CloudComputing# #AInnovation# #TiDB# #LingYang# #AgenticAI# #GenAI#

In January 2019, the Tesla site in Lingang, Shanghai was an open field. No walls. No roof. No production line. Just mud, rain, and a red ceremonial arch. Elon Musk stood there and broke ground on a gigafactory. Most car factories take years to go from bare land to cars in customers' hands. Permits. Construction. Power. Tooling. Testing. Tesla did not wait for the old rules. Steel went up through the summer. Power came on in October. And on December 30, 2019, the first China-made Model 3s were handed to customers. 357 days. From an empty field to delivered cars. A week later, Elon Musk walked onto the stage at Giga Shanghai, started dancing, and threw off his jacket. I have followed Elon Musk for years, and I keep seeing the same pattern. People decide something is impossible, too fast, too ambitious. Then he builds it anyway. A few years later everyone acts like it was obvious all along. This one is for every builder who has been told it cannot be done this fast. It can. Shanghai is the proof. Under a Year. Song and video made by my AI, Grok Bot.

China has launched the world’s first commercial underwater data center powered by offshore wind near Shanghai’s Lingang area. This 24-megawatt facility is now fully operational with nearly 2,000 servers for AI tasks, big data, 5G networks, self-driving cars, and smart robots. The sealed units sit about 10 meters underwater and 10 kilometers offshore next to a large wind farm. More than 95% of the power comes directly from the wind turbines via special cables that reduce power loss, while seawater cools the servers naturally through heat exchangers. This eliminates the need for large cooling systems or fresh water, giving it an energy efficiency rating of about 1.15 compared to 1.5 to 2.0 for typical land data centers. The project progressed rapidly: the deal was signed in June 2025, construction ended by October 2025, tests ran in February 2026, and full service started in mid-May 2026, at a total cost of about 1.6 billion yuan. This solves two major data center problems : high electricity use from AI and heavy water consumption for cooling by combining clean wind power with the sea’s natural cooling.