Microsoft’s underwater data center has been a success
Project Natick was born in 2013. Eleven years ago, data centres were already proliferating, although at that time they were far from experiencing the growth rate they have today thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Even so, several Microsoft engineers came up with a somewhat exotic experiment: they would install a data center inside a gigantic hermetically sealed cylinder and submerge it at a depth of 36 meters near the Orkney Islands in Scotland.
Their goal was to determine whether it was feasible to sustain an underwater data center made up of no less than 864 servers powered by renewable energy over time. But that was not all. They also wanted to compare the failure rate of the servers housed in the underwater data center with the typical failure rate of a land-based data center. The giant cylinder that you can see in the cover photo of this article was submerged for two years, but Microsoft has just now put an end to this original and interesting initiative.
Project Natick’ has been a success, although it will not continue (for now)
In 2020, when a team of experts recovered the underwater data center that had been submerged in the spring of 2018, Microsoft considered this experiment a success. And it had two good reasons for doing so. The first was that this initiative had conclusively demonstrated that it was possible to power such a data center uninterruptedly with renewable energy sources. And the second reason was just as important.
Only six of the 864 servers installed inside the sealed cylinder that contained the data center had failed. The others were still working perfectly. To analyze the failure rate, Microsoft installed a ground-based data center with the same characteristics, and during the same period of time in this last installation, eight servers failed.
According to Noelle Walsh, who is Microsoft’s Head of Cloud Operations and Innovation, the longevity of the servers installed in the underwater data center is due to the fact that the temperature of the sea water is very stable. In addition, the inert nitrogen used to protect the machines had also contributed to prolonging their lifespan.
Noelle Walsh has confirmed that Microsoft has called time on this project after having meticulously analysed all the data obtained during the experiment. She has also anticipated that for the moment the Redmond company does not plan to install another underwater data centre, although everything that its engineers have learned thanks to ‘Project Natick’ will be useful during the development of its next data centres.
In fact, Walsh has assured that they have learned a lot about optimizing cooling systems, as well as designing solutions designed to ensure that neither vibrations nor impacts reduce the useful life of servers. Curiously, just a few months ago China launched an experiment very similar to this Microsoft project on the southern coast of Hainan. We still don’t know much about this initiative by the country led by Xi Jinping, but there is no doubt that all innovations that contribute to reducing the environmental impact of data centers are welcome.
With years of experience in technology and software, John leads our content strategy, ensuring high-quality and informative articles about Windows, system optimization, and software updates.
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