Microsoft has ditched its Project Natick underwater data center

Date:
Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:46:33 +0000

Description:
Microsofts subsea data center project gets cancelled after more than a
decade, but yielded some important results.

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Microsoft has quietly ended its Project Natick underwater data center experiment after more than a decade of work, citing a series of quiet years that have naturally led to this point.

Noelle Walsh, the head of the companys Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, confirmed to Data Center Dynamics : I'm not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.

Despite the termination of Microsofts subsea plans, Walsh said that the company will apply lessons it has learned from the project to other work in the future. Microsofts Project Natick has been terminated

Walsh noted: 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.

The project, which started in 2013, famously saw a test unit deployed off the coast of Scotlands Orkney Islands in 2018. The underwater data center, which operated for 5 years, was designed to significantly reduce the environmental impact of the industry.

It promised to reduce latency, with Microsoft claiming that half the worlds population lives within 200km of the coast, while using local renewable
energy and minimizing the need for external cooling.

The data center industry is set for continued growth as more infrastructure
is required to support artificial intelligence's resource-heavy nature. Its unclear why Microsoft has decided not to go ahead with the project given the intense scrutiny Big Tech is facing over energy consumption and greenhouse
gas emissions.

Compared with the land-based counterpart, more servers remained active and functional in the subsea system, highlighting the impact of the seas stable temperature on the electronics.

Microsoft added: While we dont 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.

TechRadar Pro has asked Microsoft why it decided to pull the plug on the project any update will be posted here. More from TechRadar Pro These are the best cloud hosting providers Data center energy use set to spike six-fold in
a decade Store your data online with the best cloud storage and best cloud backup tools



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-has-ditched-its-project-natick-underwa ter-data-center


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