Microsoft has quietly ended its Project Natick underwater data center experiment after more than a decade, citing a series of quiet years that naturally led to this point.
Noelle Walsh, head of the company’s Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, confirmed this Data center dynamics: “I don’t build subsea data centers anywhere in the world.”
Despite the termination of Microsoft’s subsea plans, Walsh said the company will apply the lessons learned from the project to other work in the future.
Microsoft’s Project Natick has ended
Walsh noted, “My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impact on the server. So we will apply those lessons to other cases.”
The project, which started in 2013, saw a test unit deployed off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 2018. The underwater data center, which operated for five years, was designed to significantly reduce the industry’s impact on the environment.
It promised to reduce latency, with Microsoft claiming that half the world’s population lives within 200km of the coast, while using local renewable energy and minimizing the need for external cooling.
The data center industry is poised for further growth as more infrastructure is needed to support the resource-intensive nature of artificial intelligence. It is unclear why Microsoft decided not to pursue the project given the intense criticism Big Tech is facing over energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Compared to the land-based counterpart, more servers remained active and functional in the subsea system, highlighting the impact of the stable temperature of the sea on electronics.
Microsoft added: “While we do not currently have any 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. ”
Ny Breaking has asked Microsoft why it decided to pull the plug on the project – any update will be posted here.