See you soon Natic! Microsoft has abandoned one of its coolest projects ever: its underwater data center pilot is being halted despite successful results and will not return
Microsoft has officially shut down Project Natick, the underwater data center experiment that started in 2015.
Noelle Walsh, head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations + Innovation, said Data center dynamicsāIām not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world. My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about subsea operations and vibrations and impacts on the server. So weāll apply those lessons to other cases.ā
Although we hadn’t heard anything about the submarine project for a while, it was believed to still be active, but now we know that this is not the case.
On the road to robotics
The underwater data center project was first tested off the coast of Scotland in 2018. Microsoft placed 855 servers underwater for more than two years, and only six of them failed. By comparison, eight out of 135 servers failed in a similar country test. In percentage terms, that is a failure rate of 0.7% underwater versus a rate of 5.9% on land.
Project Natick leader Ben Cutler said at the time that he was convinced that the success rate of the submarine mission was due to the fact that there were no humans on board to communicate with the servers in the capsule and that less corrosive nitrogen was used instead of oxygen was used.
Enthusiastic about the initial findings, Spencer Fowers, technical team lead at Microsoft Research, said: “We’ve been able to do very well on what most land-based data centers would consider an unreliable network. We hope that we can look at our findings and say that maybe we don’t need to have as much infrastructure focused on power and reliability.”
Project Natick had incredible promise and Microsoft even looked into using it as an āartificial reef data centerā that would provide a good home not only for servers but also for ocean life, but it ultimately came to nothing.
Microsoft is exploring other advanced technologies, such as robotics, to improve data center operations, Walsh told the DCDāWeāre looking at robotics more from the perspective that some of these new servers are going to be very heavy. How can we automate that instead of having people do things? Weāre learning from other industries in terms of robotics, but weāre also very aware that we need people. I donāt want people to worry about their jobs.ā The tech giant is also considering other ways to power data centers, including exploring modular nuclear reactors.
While Microsoft has ended its underwater initiative, other companies, for example in China, are starting their own underwater data center projects.