04/10/2025

BIZ & FINANCE SATURDAY | OCT 4, 2025

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China trials ‘energy-saving’ underwater data centres

SINGAPORE: Artificial intelligence (AI) startups are attracting record sums of venture capital, but some of the world’s largest investors warned that early-stage valuations are starting to look frothy, senior investment executives said yesterday. “There’s a little bit of a hype bubble going on in the early-stage venture space,“ said Bryan Yeo, group chief investment officer at Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC , as part of a panel discussion at the Milken Institute Asia Summit 2025 in Singapore. “Any company startup with an AI label will be valued right up there at huge multiples of whatever the small revenue (is),“ he said. “That might be fair for some companies and probably not for others.” In the first quarter of 2025, AI startups raised US$73.1 billion (RM307 billion) globally, accounting for 57.9% of all venture capital funding, according to PitchBook. The surge was driven by funding rounds like OpenAI’s US$40 billion capital raising, as investors raced to catch the AI wave. Todd Sisitsky, president of alternative asset manager TPG , said the fear of missing out is dangerous for investors, though he added that views were divided on whether the AI sector had formed a bubble. Some AI firms are hitting US$100 million in revenue within months, he said, while others in early-stage ventures command valuations at between US$400 million and US$1.2 billion per employee. He said that was “breathtaking.” – Reuters AI startup valuations raise bubble fears as funding surges Boeing 777X to be delayed till 2027 SEATTLE: Delivery of Boeing’s 777X jet is being pushed back to early 2027, instead of next year, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the launch customer for Boeing’s newest widebody aircraft, is already preparing for a setback and not including the 777X in its fleet plans until 2027, the report said, citing one of the sources. Boeing declined to comment. Several Wall Street analysts expect Boeing to announce a charge related to the delay ranging from US$1 billion to US$4 billion in its third-quarter earnings report later this month. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said last month that the company was behind schedule in certifying the jet, saying a “mountain of work” needed to be done. He added, however, that no new technical problems had been identified and did not indicate a new delay to first delivery. The company was expected to deliver the first 777X jet in 2026, already six years later than had been anticipated when the program was launched in 2013. The planemaker has already taken more than US$10 billion in charges on the program. RBC Capital Markets aerospace analyst Ken Herbert told investors on Sunday that he expects 777X deliveries to start in the second half of 2027. – Reuters

Projects like this are currently focused on showing “technological feasibility”, said expert Shaolei Ren from the University of California, Riverside. Microsoft never built commercially on its trial, saying after retrieving its pod in 2020 that the project had been successfully completed. Ren said major construction and environmental hurdles must be cleared before underwater data centres can scale up. In China, government subsidies are helping – Highlander received 40 million yuan (RM24 million) for a similar 2022 project in Hainan province that is still running. “The actual completion of the underwater data centre involved greater construction challenges than initially expected,” said Zhou Jun, an engineer for Highlander’s Shanghai project. Built onshore in separate components before being installed in the sea, it will draw nearly all its power from nearby offshore wind farms. Highlander says that more than

“reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store – and Apple did so.” Apple did not immediately respond to an AFP request for comment. In a statement to NBC News, the company said: “Based on information we’ve received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store.” 95% of the energy used will come from renewable sources. The most obvious challenge in placing the structure under the waves is keeping its contents dry and safe from corrosion by salt water. The Chinese project addresses this by using a protective coating containing glass flakes on the steel capsule that holds the servers. To allow maintenance crews access, an elevator will connect the main pod structure to a segment that remains above the water. Ren from UC Riverside said laying the internet connection between an offshore data centre and the mainland was a more complex process than with traditional land servers. Researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have also found that sub-marine data centres can be vulnerable to attacks using sound waves conducted through water. Technical hurdles aside, the warming effect of underwater data centres on the surrounding water has raised questions about the impact on marine ecosystems. Andrew Want, a marine ecologist at the University of Hull, said the heat emitted could in some cases attract certain species while driving away others. “These are unknowns at this point – there’s no sufficient research being conducted yet,” he said. Highlander told AFP a 2020 independent assessment of the company’s test project near Zhuhai, in southern China, indicated that the surrounding water stayed well below acceptable temperature thresholds. However, Ren warned that scaling up centres would also scale up the heat given off. He stressed that “for megawatt scale data centres underwater, the thermal pollution problem needs to be studied more carefully”. Offshore facilities can complement standard data centres, Ren suggested. “They’re probably not going to replace existing traditional data centres, but can provide service to some niche segments.”

o New offshore servers near Shanghai promise cooler, greener computing but face ecological and technical hurdles

NANTONG: Power-hungry data centres run hot, so one Chinese company is planning to submerge a pod of servers in the sea off Shanghai with hopes of solving computing’s energy woes. On a wharf near the city, workers were finishing off the large yellow capsule – a foray into alternative tech infrastructure that faces questions over its ecological impact and commercial viability. The world’s websites and apps rely on physical data centres to store information, with growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) contributing to skyrocketing demand for the facilities. “Underwater operations have inherent advantages,” said Yang Ye of maritime equipment firm Highlander, which is developing the Shanghai pod with state

owned construction companies. Undersea servers are kept at a low temperature by ocean currents, rather than the energy-intensive air cooling or water evaporation required by centres on land. The technology was trialled by Microsoft off the coast of Scotland in 2018, but the Chinese project, to be sunk in mid-October, is one of the world’s first commercial services of its kind. It will serve clients such as China Telecom and a state-owned AI computing company, and is part of a broader government push to lower data centres’ carbon footprint. “Underwater facilities can save approximately 90% of energy consumption for cooling,” Yang, vice-president of Highlander, told AFP.

An underwater data centre being developed by Chinese maritime technology company Highlander is seen under construction at a shipyard in Nantong, in China’s eastern Jingsu province. – AFPPIX

Apple pulls immigration tracker from app store

WASHINGTON: Apple removed on Thursday several apps used to anonymously report the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from its app store, reportedly following Trump administration pressure. The apps had become increasingly popular in recent months as President Donald Trump’s deportation drive gained steam in cities around the country. But Trump administration officials

facilities and during ICE operations around the country, as Trump’s mass deportation drive has seen thousands of migrants rounded up, often by masked agents. ICE tracking apps including the popular ICEBlock were inaccessible to AFP reporters on the Apple App Store late Thursday. Fox Business first reported on the apps’ removal, with Attorney-General Pam Bondi telling the news outlet that the Justice Department had

had fiercely criticized the apps as endangering officers, particularly following a deadly shooting at an ICE facility in Texas last month. Officials said the shooter had used such an app in the days leading up to his attack. Two detainees died as a result of the shooting and another was wounded, though investigators believe the shooter was targeting ICE personnel. Protests have occurred at ICE