Where tech companies like Facebook and Google prefer to move their data centers to colder countries to reduce their air conditioning bill, Microsoft has come up with an even better home for data centers while cutting high energy costs for cooling them: Under the Sea.
Here's what Microsoft says:
"50% of us live near the coast. Why doesn't our data?"
Building massive data centers underwater might sound crazy, but it is exactly something Microsoft is testing with its first submarine data center, dubbed Leona Philpot.
World's First Underwater Data Center
The testing is part of Microsoft’s plan dubbed Project Natick — an ongoing research project to build and run a data center that is submerged in the ocean, which the company believes, could make data centers faster, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and easier to set up.
Leona Philpot (named after the Halo character from Microsoft's Xbox) was tested last August, when engineers placed an enormous steel capsule a kilometer off the California coast, 30 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean.
A single data center computing rack was placed in an eight-foot-wide steel capsule, which was covered in around 100 sensors to monitor every aspect of the underwater conditions: pressure, humidity, and, most importantly, motion.
The test ran from August to November last year (exactly 105 days) and the engineers said it was more successful than expected.
Why Underwater Data Center?
According to Microsoft, these are the main reasons for experimenting with underwater data centers:
1. Air conditioning cost is one of the biggest pain in running data centers. Traditional data centers are believed to consume up to 3 percent of the world's electricity.
