Microsoft Ends Project Natick Underwater Data Center Project

TapTechNews June 23rd, Microsoft quietly ended the Project Natick underwater data center (UDC) experiment project that started in 2013. Noelle Walsh, the head of the company's cloud computing operations and innovation division, confirmed this news. She said, 'We won't build submarine data centers anywhere.' However, Walsh also pointed out, 'This project is successful and has allowed us to learn a lot about underwater operations, server shockproofing, and the impact on servers, and we will apply this knowledge to other fields.'

With the surge in demand for data centers, their number is expected to increase exponentially in the coming years. Only last year, Nvidia sold more than 3.76 million data center GPUs. It is expected that these graphics cards will consume 14.3 TWh of electricity annually, not including the energy consumption of the cooling system. According to DataSpan, 40% of the power consumption in data centers is used for cooling systems. Therefore, if Microsoft can find a way to reduce or even eliminate this cost, it can reduce the power demand for building data centers.

In addition to the potential energy-saving benefits, Microsoft also learned other things from the servers deployed on the Scottish coast in 2018. Compared with the concurrent onshore contrast experiment, only 6 out of 855 servers placed underwater by Microsoft failed, while 8 out of 135 deployed on land needed to be replaced, with failure rates of 0.7% and 5.9%, respectively. Microsoft said the main reason for the longer service life of the servers is the stability of seawater temperature and the inert nitrogen used to protect the servers.

When asked whether the knowledge learned from this project includes the use of robots in data centers, Walsh said, 'We are more focused on whether robots can help move these future potentially very heavy servers and free people from heavy physical labor. We are learning robot technology from other industries, but we also recognize that data centers need people to maintain, and I don't want people to worry about their jobs being replaced by robots.'

It is worth noting that Microsoft did not disclose whether it will restart the underwater data center project in the future.

Walsh said, 'It can be said that now our research and development direction is more focused. We will try different projects, and the knowledge learned may play a role in other projects. But now, our focus is very clear.' However, Microsoft has not stopped the data center development project. It is reported that the company is collaborating with OpenAI to build an AI supercomputer data center worth $100 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 728.191 billion Chinese yuan) and plans to use modular nuclear reactors to provide power for such projects.