Microsoft's Project Natick dives deep for subsea data center

REDMOND, WASHINGTON — Gaming enthusiasts have long been water-cooling their PCs for optimum performance, something Microsoft recently put to the test on an industrial scale with a subsea data center.

The New York Times reports that in 2015, Microsoft's Project Natick deployed an experimental prototype vessel off the coast of California. It consisted of a single rack of servers and pressurized nitrogen, sealed inside a white steel capsule, with heat exchangers attached to the hull.

Named the Leona Philpot, after a character in the Halo video game series, the vessel was submerged 30 feet into the Pacific Ocean, where the waters acted as a natural coolant.

To better understand how to operate in an undersea environment, researchers measured pressure, humidity, motion and other conditions, successfully operating the self-contained data center for 105 days, between August and November of 2015, according to PC World.

Project Natick's next step is to build a new system three times as large, designed to be left underwater for five years at a time.

With the project still in its early stages, no one can know for certain when Microsoft will be coming out with a viable product. But judging from potential alone, the future of data centers could very well be under the sea.

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