Microsoft’s new way of cooling its data centers: Throw them in the sea

Lowering Leona Philpot into the water. (credit: Microsoft)

Air conditioning is one of the biggest costs in running data centers. Traditional data centers use as much electricity for cooling as they do for running the actual IT equipment. Accordingly, much of the innovation seen in the high-density cloud server space has been to develop data centers that are cheaper to cool and hence cheaper to run. With its much higher heat capacity than air, water has become the coolant of choice, pumped around and between the computers to transport their heat outside.

Project Natick

Microsoft has demonstrated an experimental prototype of a new approach: instead of pumping water around the data center, put the data center in the water. Project Natick is a research project to build and run a data center that's submerged in the ocean. The company built an experimental vessel, named the Leona Philpot, and deployed it on the seafloor about 1 kilometer off the Pacific coast. It ran successfully from August to November last year.

Leona Philpot and the team that designed her: from left to right, Eric Peterson, Spencer Fowers, Norm Whitaker, Ben Cutler, Jeff Kramer. (credit: Microsoft)

As well as the obvious cooling advantage this brings, Microsoft argues that this kind of data center will bring other benefits, too. About half of the world's population lives within 200km of the ocean, and so the ability to put data centers in the water means that they can always be located close to major population centers. This in turn ensures that they offer low latency connections. The company also says that the self-contained units can be deployed quickly, within 90 days, rather than the 2 years it takes to build a conventional building, or the 1 year that Microsoft says its fourth generation data centers take. The units could also be paired with tidal power generation to further reduce their environmental impact.

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