Project Natick: Microsoft's underwater data center
Microsoft sank a sealed data center holding 864 servers on the seafloor off Scotland's Orkney Islands in 2018, powered by the islands' renewable grid, and raised it two years later. Servers failed far less often than in a matching data center on land. Microsoft later ended the project.
What they learned
Underwater servers failed at one-eighth the rate of servers on land
From public sources: Microsoft reported a failure rate underwater of about one-eighth of a matching set of servers on land. The team's leading explanation was the sealed nitrogen atmosphere, which corrodes less than air, and the absence of people bumping equipment; it planned to study the failed parts to confirm this.
It worked, and Microsoft stopped anyway
From public sources: in 2024 a Microsoft executive told DatacenterDynamics the experiment worked but that the company was not building undersea data centers, and would apply what it learned about operations and vibration elsewhere. A successful pilot is not always the start of a rollout.
The problem
Data centers use large amounts of energy and fresh water for cooling.
Sources
- Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably, Microsoft (14 Sep 2020)
- Microsoft confirms Project Natick underwater data center is no more, DatacenterDynamics (17 Jun 2024)