Microsoft ends underwater data center project as others explore ocean-based AI infrastructure

Microsoft has pulled the plug on Project Natick, its decade-long experiment in sinking data centers to the ocean floor. The company confirmed in June 2024 that it has no active subsea data center projects and won’t pursue commercial underwater deployments, despite the initiative producing some genuinely impressive results. What Project Natick actually proved Project Natick launched in 2013 with a simple premise: what if you could cool servers with the ocean itself, skip the massive HVAC systems, and seal everything in a nitrogen-filled tube that humans never need to enter? During Phase 2, which ran from 2018 to 2020 off Scotland’s Orkney Islands, Microsoft submerged a pod containing 855 servers. Over more than two years of operation with minimal maintenance, only six of those servers failed. That translates to a failure rate of roughly 0.7%, compared to about 5.9% for equivalent land-based servers. The project also achieved a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.07 using seawater cooling. Most conventional data centers operate somewhere around 1.3 to 1.6. Why Microsoft walked away Microsoft’s current infrastructure priorities center on massive land-based AI clusters designed to han...