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.
The company said that the primary reason for this longevity is seawater’s temperature stability and the inert nitrogen gas used to protect the servers. When asked whether using robots in data centers as part of its learnings, Walsh said, “We’re looking at robotics more from the perspective that some of these new servers will be very heavy. How can we automate that versus having people push things around? We are learning from other industries on robotics, but we’re also very cognizant that we need people. I don’t want people worried about their jobs.”
While Microsoft has concluded its undersea data center research, China just began its submerged server project in 2023, lowering 68,000 square meters of servers on the southern coast of Hainan. On the other hand, Microsoft did not indicate whether it would start another UDC project in the future.
Welsh said, “I would say now we’re getting more focused. We like to do R&D and try things out, and you learn something here and it may fly over there. But I’d say now, it’s very focused.” Nevertheless, Microsoft isn’t stopping its data center development projects. The company is reportedly partnering with OpenAI to build a $100 billion AI supercomputer data center, and it has nuclear ambitions to build modular reactors for projects like these.
