Microsoft is exploring a future of housing data centers underwater with Project Natick.
According to Microsoft's page for the project, it all started with a ThinkWeek Paper in 2013 - written by Sean James, a Microsoft employee. This paper led to the idea of placing data centers underwater.
Data centers that exist now can process huge amounts of data, used for the purposes of video streaming and emailing among other things. The problem, however, is the huge amount of energy that goes into keeping these data centers cool. Too much heat can cause servers to crash, which isn't good news for anybody who uses the Internet - which is everyone.
With Microsoft's new endeavor, Project Natick, this problem could be addressed. Keeping data centers in the ocean would keep them cool. Also, Microsoft aims to use renewable energy to generate electricity - by suspending containers that would look like jelly beans right under the surface of the sea, with turbines that would generate electricity using the ocean current.
And Microsoft has tested this. The prototype data center, the Leona Philpot, named after a character in the video game series "Halo" was placed 30 feet under the ocean surface off the coast of California for four months, Tech Times reported. It contained computer hardware, and did not need people to be on-site for almost two decades.
The 8 diameter capsule has now been underwater for 105 days. It was overseen by engineers at the Microsoft campus and the trial turned out to be a lot more successful than Microsoft expected.
A new trial is expected to be started around 2017, the location of which has not been revealed yet.
