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Microsoft quietly shelved underwater datacentre project

Lessons have been learned from Project Natick, says Microsoft’s Noelle Walsh

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Microsoft has quietly shelved the underwater data centre test system it deployed in the Orkney Islands, Scotland in 2018, and admitted that it is no longer planning similar new projects.

Microsoft claims that it had proved a successful experiment in terms of reliability, adding that lessons had been learnt that will be applied to future datacentre installations. Indeed, a number of patents related to the project were filed as a result, and open-sourced in 2021 as part of the Low-Carbon Patent Pledge in 2021.

The company kicked off Project Natick in 2013, deploying the test system in Scotland five years later. A capsule containing 855 servers was submerged for just over two years, running in an atmosphere of inert nitrogen gas and thereafter left unattended. A ‘control' group of 135 servers, running an instance of Microsoft's Azure cloud, was also left running in a normal datacentre on land, so relative performance and reliability could be tested.

According to Noelle Walsh, head of Microsoft's Cloud Operations+Innovation division, of the 855 servers running underwater, just six suffered some kind of failure, compared to eight in the control group on dry land.

Walsh attributed the greater reliability of the underwater data centre to the greater temperature stability offered by the chilly Scottish sea water, as well as the inert nitrogen gas providing a less reactive atmosphere.

However, Microsoft is not planning any further underwater datacentre experiments or installations. Instead, Walsh told Datacentre Dynamics, the company has intensified its research into the use of robotics in datacentres.

"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," she said.

However, Microsoft datacentres will not be going human-free any time soon, she was keen to add.

"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 cognisant that we need people."

Project Natick is not the only underwater datacentre installation. In 2023, the first commercial submerged data centre was launched – or sunk – off the coast of Hainan Island in China. Highlander, the company behind the project, plans to install 100 units over the next five years some 35 metres underwater, with each unit weighing more than 1,300 tons and comparable in power to around 60,000 servers.

That project followed on from tests in 2021 in Zhuhai, Guangdong.

Microsoft quietly shelved underwater datacentre project

Lessons have been learned from Project Natick, says Microsoft’s Noelle Walsh

Microsoft has quietly shelved the underwater data centre test system it deployed in the Orkney Islands, Scotland in 2018, and admitted that it is no longer planning similar new projects.

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