Microsoft Corp. today revealed that it has deployed, or more precisely sunk, a self-contained data center in the waters off Scotland as part of a moonshot research initiative dubbed Project Natick.

The 40-foot-long capsule (pictured) holds 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage. According Microsoft, the hardware inside is cooled by specialized radiators that use technology originally developed for submarines to pump in cold seawater from the outside.

The company will use the capsule to assess the economic viability of operating subsea data centers. Theoretically, harnessing the low water temperatures on the ocean floor could reduce the cost of cooling computing equipment, which is among biggest expenses for traditional land-based facilities. This approach would also ease the burden on the electricity grid in the process.

The potential benefit for users is faster access to online services. Strategically placing submerged data centers near coastal areas would help cut latency for the more than half of the world’s population that lives within 120 miles of a shoreline.

Of course, realizing this vision will be far easier said than done. Deploying a fleet of such undersea capsules would be a massively complex undertaking, at least judging by the amount of work it took Microsoft to deploy the one that it now has running.

The journey to get the data center to the bottom of the sea started at an assembly plant in France. Microsoft’s engineers bolted the capsule shut after they completed testing and shipped it off to Scotland on the back of an 18-wheel truck. From there, a barge equipped with a crane towed it out to sea for deployment.

“The marine crew used 10 winches, a crane, a gantry barge and a remotely operated vehicle that accompanied the datacenter on its journey.” the company detailed in a blog post. “A remotely operated vehicle retrieved a cable containing the fiber optic and power wiring from the seafloor and brought it to the surface where it was checked and attached to the datacenter, and the datacenter powered on.”

The engineers assigned to Project Natick will spend the next 12 months monitoring the data center’s performance and physical status. Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI and Research division, mused that the lessons the company will learn in the process could help advance not just the project itself but also its land-based data centers. 

“When you go for a moonshot, you might not ever get to the moon,” Lee said. “It is great if you do, but, regardless, you learn a lot and there are unexpected spinoffs along the way. You get Velcro at some point. That is happening in this case. We are learning about disk failures, about rack design, about the mechanical engineering of cooling systems and those things will feedback into our normal datacenters.”

Photo: Microsoft