Microsoft has quietly ended its Project Natick underwater data center initiative after over a decade of experimentation. Noelle Walsh, head of the company’s Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, confirmed the conclusion of the project to Data Center Dynamics: “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.”
Despite halting the subsea plans, Walsh emphasized that the lessons learned from Project Natick will be applied to other future projects. She stated, “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 learnings to other cases.”
Launched in 2013, Project Natick gained attention with its deployment off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands in 2018. The underwater data center, which operated for five years, was intended to reduce environmental impact by leveraging local renewable energy and minimizing external cooling needs. It also aimed to reduce latency by placing data centers closer to coastal populations.
Microsoft has ended their underwater servers experiment, but it does seem to have yielded good results, servers had one-eighth of the failure rate of data centers with the same components on land. https://t.co/bbyG4NAJma pic.twitter.com/utPi0uDjVz
— David Amador 🐙 (@DJ_Link) June 25, 2024
The data center industry is expected to grow significantly to support the resource-intensive nature of artificial intelligence. Despite the benefits demonstrated by Project Natick, including higher server functionality due to stable underwater temperatures, Microsoft has chosen to cease the project amid growing scrutiny over energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Microsoft added, “While we don’t currently have 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.”
Microsoft ends Project Natick underwater data center experiment despite success
We’re still seeing companies testing underwater data centers, but Microsoft has decided to call time on its experiment, Project Natick. It sounds as if plac… https://t.co/GoHisqEnkj
— TechSpot (@TechSpot) June 24, 2024
This decision underscores Microsoft’s commitment to leveraging innovative research for future data center advancements, even as it moves away from subsea installations.
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Abdul is a tech-savvy, coffee-fueled, and creatively driven marketer who loves keeping up with the latest software updates and tech gadgets. He's also a skilled technical writer who can explain complex concepts simply for a broad audience. Abdul enjoys sharing his knowledge of the Cloud industry through user manuals, documentation, and blog posts.
