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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteMicrosoft’s latest full-scale underwater data center was the Northern Isles module in Project Natick. Deployed off Orkney, Scotland, in June 2018, it spent more than two years on the seabed before Microsoft retrieved it in July 2020. Microsoft reported that its servers had one-eighth the failure rate of a land-based control group. The module was a research trial, not a commercial Azure data center. In June 2024, Microsoft said it was not building subsea data centers, while keeping Natick as a research platform.
What was Microsoft’s underwater data center?
Project Natick was Microsoft’s research effort to test the feasibility, benefits, and challenges of data centers at sea, including the possibility of powering them with offshore renewable energy. Its Northern Isles module was a full-scale test installation, not a production facility serving Azure customers.
Microsoft selected Naval Group and its subsidiary Naval Energies to design, build, and deploy the module. The installation went to the European Marine Energy Centre, a test site for tidal and wave energy in Orkney. Microsoft’s [project overview](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/) describes the project and its reported findings.
What the module contained
The watertight steel vessel held 864 servers and was filled with dry nitrogen before deployment. More than 18 Microsoft groups used the installation. In March 2020, it also supplied computing resources to Folding@home and World Community Grid for COVID-19 research, according to Microsoft’s [2020 project report](https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/).
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When was it deployed and retrieved?
Microsoft deployed the Northern Isles module in June 2018 and retrieved it in July 2020, after more than two years on the seafloor. Microsoft’s [Phase 2 timeline](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/natick/phase-2-timeline/) records those milestones.
Getting a sealed vessel to and from the seabed required unusually calm seas and a coordinated recovery involving robots and winches. Microsoft reported that deployment and recovery each took a full day. After retrieval, the vessel had algae and barnacles, and sea anemones had grown in sheltered areas of its base. Microsoft’s project page says components will be recycled and the seabed restored to its earlier state; that is a stated plan, not confirmation here that the work was completed.
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What did Microsoft learn from the trial?
Server reliability
Microsoft reported that servers in the Northern Isles module had one-eighth the failure rate of servers in a land-based control group. The result belongs to this particular experiment; it does not establish that subsea servers everywhere will be eight times as reliable. The public materials cited here do not provide enough methodological detail to independently assess the comparison or generalize it.
Cooling and water
Microsoft said the surrounding seawater allowed the sealed installation to be cooled without drawing on freshwater. This describes the trial’s cooling approach, not a complete assessment of its environmental impact.
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Power and operating conditions
At the Orkney test site, the module connected by cable to the island grid. Microsoft described that grid as supplied by wind, solar, and experimental green-energy technologies, and said the installation ran on a grid its team considered unreliable by conventional data-center standards. The project also prompted discussion of whether its results could inform power and reliability infrastructure at land-based facilities, or support future co-location with offshore wind. Those possibilities were not a decision to build a commercial underwater fleet.
Remote operation and networking
Microsoft Research reports that in 2019 it routed some traffic between Natick and Redmond through a network tunnel protected with post-quantum cryptography. Because the servers were inaccessible to staff after the vessel was sealed, the module provided a way to test remote setup. Microsoft says Natick imitated a data center but did not carry critical business or customer data. The experiment ended when the vessel was decommissioned and retrieved on July 9, 2020. Microsoft Research’s project page describes the networking test.
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Is Microsoft still building underwater data centers?
In June 2024, Noelle Walsh, head of Microsoft’s Cloud Operations + Innovation division, told Data Center Dynamics: “I’m not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world.” Microsoft separately told the publication that it did not then have data centers in the water and would continue using Project Natick as a research platform to explore and test concepts related to reliability and sustainability, including liquid immersion. These statements were reported by Data Center Dynamics. The sources cited here do not establish a later reversal.
That status distinguishes research from deployment: Microsoft has described Natick as useful for exploring ideas, but the Northern Isles trial did not become a commercial cloud facility.
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What the trial does—and does not—show
Natick produced project-specific observations about server reliability, seawater cooling, power conditions, remote operation, and marine recovery. Those findings may inform future engineering, but they do not settle whether underwater data centers are commercially viable or environmentally superior overall.
The Microsoft sources cited here do not provide a named, independently published whole-life cost comparison or a complete lifecycle-emissions comparison. They therefore do not establish that the approach is cheaper, produces lower total emissions, or can be scaled commercially. A fair comparison with land-based or other edge facilities would also need to account for maintenance access, power supply, cooling, environmental monitoring and restoration, network distance to users, and full lifecycle cost.
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