Why Microsoft Has Underwater Data Centers.
Eight million data centers around the world are processing our entire online lives thousands of times a second, but Microsoft may have just rewritten this growing industry, and it may be for the better. With our reliance on cloud-based services expected to be at an all-time high in 2021 due to a huge shift online pushed forward by the ongoing pandemic, the need for the most energy and time efficient data centers is crucial moving forward.
Microsoft has just reached the end of a two-year stage two experiment, sinking our data to the ocean floor, and here’s why this is big news. On 9 July 2020, the tech giant reeled up what it calls its ‘Northern Isles,’ a 12.2-meter-long steel cylinder, from the seabed. The giant tube remained 117 feet below the surface for 2 whole years, gathering data which would later be analysed by engineers. The company chose to locate this long-term experiment 10 miles off the coast of Scotland in the Orkney Islands archipelago. Here, 100% of the energy comes from environmentally green sources such as wind and solar.
Microsoft reveals findings from Project Natick, its experimental undersea data center.
Earlier this summer, marine specialists reeled up a shipping container-size data center coated in algae, barnacles, and sea anemones from the seafloor off Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The retrieval of the Northern Isles datacenter launched the final phase of Project Natick, a years-long research effort that proved the concept of underwater datacenters is feasible as well as logistically, environmentally, and economically practical.