With Project Natick, Microsoft is testing underwater data centres running on 100% renewables, off the coast of Scotland — with the aim of reducing energy consumption.
Project Natick, Microsoft's underwater data centre initiative, has entered phase two: an underwater data centre powered 100 per cent by renewable energy. This is the Redmond company's new research project, through which it aims to experiment with new solutions for delivering cloud services to its users. Data centres are essentially containers in which dozens of computers work without interruption to manage shared data efficiently. The underwater vessel conceived by Microsoft is a container capable of withstanding ocean pressure and of being powered by renewable energy produced locally.
The container was deployed in early June off the coast of an island in the Orkney archipelago, Scotland. In this way, engineers will exploit the lower temperatures of the Atlantic to keep the servers cool — which will allow significant energy savings — while using electricity generated by wind and solar installations on the nearby islands to power them.
Being placed below sea level would therefore allow for a dramatic reduction in the servers' energy bills. These rooms full of computers are notoriously required to be kept at low temperatures in order to function at their best. This is why many companies choose high-latitude locations for their data centres. Microsoft has instead opted for the seabed.
According to the company founded by Bill Gates, this solution would also make it possible to have a fully autonomous cloud system, with low energy consumption and entirely recyclable. The useful life of the container, built from recycled materials and recyclable once decommissioned, would range from five to ten years, depending also on the lifespan of the computers. "Phase two of Natick is intended to prove that we can economically manufacture full-scale underwater data centres and deploy them in under 90 days from date of switch-on," Microsoft explained.
The billions of pieces of data exchanged every day require energy to be shared and stored. The single underwater data centre built by Microsoft alone can store 5 million films and thousands of gigabytes of data. But this means consuming energy. US data centres alone use more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, equivalent to 34 power stations of 500 megawatts each. An enormous figure which, when aggregated at a global level, amounts to 3 per cent of worldwide electricity consumption. And forecasts point to a doubling of consumption within four years. Under these conditions, and with the constant growth in the use of big data, the only path forward is renewables and, perhaps, the solution conceived by Microsoft.