In brief: We’re still seeing companies testing underwater data centers, but Microsoft has decided to call time on its experiment, Project Natick. It sounds as if placing the 40-foot-long tube filled with 12 racks of servers off the coast of Scotland was a success, but Redmond is now focusing on its land-based data centers.
Project Natick’s origins stretch all the way back to 2013. Following a three-month trial in the Pacific, a submersible data center capsule was deployed 120 miles off the coast of Scotland in 2018. It was brought back to the surface in 2020, offering what were said to be promising results.
Microsoft lost six of the 855 servers that were in the capsule during its time underwater. In a comparison experiment being run simultaneously on dry land, it lost eight out of 135 servers.
Microsoft noted that the constant temperature stability of the external seawater was a factor in the experiment’s success. It also highlighted how the data center was filled with inert nitrogen gas that protected the servers, as opposed to the reactive oxygen gas in the land data center.
Despite everything going so well, Microsoft is discontinuing Project Natick. “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world,” Noelle Walsh, the head of the company’s Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, told DatacenterDynamics.
“My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So we’ll apply those learnings to other cases,” Walsh added.
When asked whether Microsoft had learned if it could one day have human-free data centers filled with robots, Walsh said: “We’re looking at robotics more from the perspective that some of these new servers will be very heavy. How can we automate that versus having people push things around?”
“We are learning from other industries on robotics, but we’re also very cognizant that we need people. I don’t want people worried about their jobs,” she added.
Microsoft also patented a high-pressure data center in 2019 and an artificial reef data center in 2017, but it seems the company is putting resources into traditional builds for now. “I would say now we’re getting more focused,” Walsh said. “We like to do R&D and try things out, and you learn something here and it may fly over there. But I’d say now, it’s very focused.”
“While we don’t currently have data centers in the water, we will continue to use Project Natick as a research platform to explore, test, and validate new concepts around data center reliability and sustainability, for example with liquid immersion.”
In December, China sank the first modules of what it says is the world’s first underwater commercial data center. These were the first of more than 100 cylindrical modules, spanning over 731,945 square feet, that will be lowered around 115 feet onto the bottom of the sea – a journey that takes three hours to complete. The structure will ultimately offer the performance of around 60,000 computers working in unison, according to the report. The cold seawater is forecast to save 122 million kilowatt-hours of electricity and 105,000 tons of freshwater annually.
In May, researchers discovered that the unique environment of underwater data centers makes them vulnerable to a specific attack: sound waves. A study detailed how sound at the resonant frequency of the hard disk drives causes vibrations at a given velocity and intensity directly proportional to the sound pressure level, affecting the read/write performance of the disk.
