Microsoft shelves its underwater data center — Project Natick had fewer server failures compared to servers on land
Microsoft has quietly discontinued its Project Natick underwater data center (UDC) experiment, which began in 2013. The company confirmed the news with DatacenterDynamics, with Head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations + Innovation Noelle Walsh saying, “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.” She later added, “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 learning to other cases.”
Data centers are expected to grow exponentially in the coming years, with Nvidia selling over 3.76 million data center GPUs last year alone. These cards are expected to consume 14.3 TWh of electricity in a year, which doesn’t include the cooling solutions. According to DataSpan, 40% of data center consumption is in cooling systems, so if Microsoft can find a way to reduce or even eliminate this cost, it could reduce its power requirements for building a data center.
Aside from the potential energy savings, Microsoft discovered other things from the servers it installed off the coast of Scotland in 2018. The company only lost six of the 855 submerged servers versus the eight servers that needed replacement (from the total of 135) on the parallel experiment Microsoft ran on land. It equates to a 0.7% loss in the sea versus 5.9% on land.
