The idea of an underwater data center sounds crazy at first. Almost nothing seems as inhospitable to high-end electronics as the sea. Metal and saltwater seem like a terrible combination, but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft and others from experimenting with placing data centers underwater. Is Microsoft pursuing a crazy pipe dream, or are there actually some advantages to underwater data centers?
It turns out that maybe the idea does have some potential:
Lowering cooling costs
Data centers burn through immense amounts of electricity, which ultimately heats up the facility. To prevent our servers and other equipment from overheating, we need elaborate cooling systems to keep the temperatures optimal. The air-conditioning infrastructure, plus the electricity to run it, ends up adding significantly to the cost of maintaining an efficient data center. But in many places, seawater is cooler than the ambient air temperature, which means that we can use it to cool our hardware. If underwater data centers can significantly reduce our cooling costs, they may be able to bring down the overall costs of operating a data center
Reducing equipment failures
The lower temperatures of the ocean help us to keep our hardware running at the optimum levels, which helps to boost the lifespan of the equipment compared to hardware that is being run in a hot environment.
Another advantage is that under the water, we can create completely sealed environments, with nothing going in or out. There is no dust going into the underwater data center from employees opening the doors, nor are employees accidentally bumping the server racks. These factors can also help to prolong the lifespan of the equipment within the data center.
One of the problems of having a sealed environment revolves around when equipment fails–we can’t exactly send a technician down there in scuba gear, and if they were to enter the data center, that would reduce some of the advantages of having a completely sealed and isolated environment.
However, we can just let the equipment fail and not repair it. Instead, we just accept that over time, an underwater data center will have a certain level of equipment failure, resulting in reduced capacity. Once a certain portion of the underwater data center’s hardware has failed and it is no longer profitable to keep running it, the owners could simply bring the data center to the surface and overhaul all of the equipment. Using robots to repair the hardware is one option that could be explored once technology advances.
Another bonus of not having to worry about technicians entering the underwater data centers is that since no one needs to breathe inside the data center, there is no need for Oxygen, which is a reactive gas that can also shorten the lifespan of equipment. Instead, we can use an inert gas like Nitrogen, which should help to keep the hardware lasting even longer.
Proximity to users
In order to reduce latency, we want our data centers to be close to users. However, real estate near major cities can be incredibly expensive, and the land costs for a data center must ultimately be worked into the prices that end consumers pay. However, many major cities sit right by the water, and the ocean is often under-utilized. Although there may be some jurisdiction-dependent legal loopholes to jump through in placing data centers on the seafloor, there is still the potential that we could reduce costs by placing the data centers in the ocean in places that would otherwise go unused.
The future of underwater data centers
Microsoft’s Project Natick is the most renowned underwater data center experiment. It involved placing 855 servers in a sealed vessel under the sea, with a control group of 135 servers remaining on dry land. After a trial of 25 months, Microsoft found that the underwater data center had only lost six out of 855 servers, while the control group lost eight. This indicates that the failure rate was substantially lower for the underwater servers.
However, despite the project’s impressive results, Microsoft does not have any other underwater data centers at the moment. The company states that, “While we don’t 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.”
While the company remains tight-lipped about its future plans, it’s possible that Microsoft is still in the R&D stage and its technology isn’t ready for commercial deployment. Microsoft isn’t the only organization pursuing underwater data centers, with a Chinese company also appearing to be deploying the technology.