Project Overview

Microsoft developed an underwater data center known as Project Natick, which is a 40-foot sealed subsea module containing 12 racks and 864 servers with up to 27.6 petabytes of storage capacity. The Project Natick is designed and operated by Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure team to test whether ocean-based data centers could offer faster deployment, better cooling efficiency, and higher reliability compared to traditional land facilities. 

The project was first announced back in 2013, as first floated inside a data center by Microsoft, and was officially launched internally in July 2014. However, in June 2024, Microsoft officially confirmed that Project Natick is no longer active and that there are no underwater data centers currently in operation. 

Project Background

Microsoft's Project Natick was started as an internal research idea back in 2013, when a Microsoft researcher who was an ex-Navy submariner proposed the idea of setting up data centers underwater to cut down on the cooling costs and boost sustainability. 

The prototype of phase 1 was launched in August 2015 as a small "micro" data center, which was placed about 30 feet underwater off the coast of California. The data center was run underwater for 105 days and then was retrieved; the results declared early successes that inspired Microsoft to pursue a phase II in 2018. 

In phase II, a fully shipping container-sized capsule was installed off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland at about 117 feet deep. The capsule was called the " Northern Isles" pod. 

Project Location

Microsoft's underwater data centers were located at the  European Marine Energy Centre, Scotland, in the UK. The project was deployed in two phases. Phase 1 was deployed somewhere off the Pacific coast of the United States, while Phase 2 was deployed at EMEC, Orkney Islands, Scotland, in the UK.

Project Timeline

Microsoft Data Center in Ocean: Technical Specifications

Microsoft Data Center in Sea: Contractors & Suppliers

Investors

Project Natick was fully funded and backed internally by Microsoft Corporation as part of its long-term research and innovation strategy. This Microsoft data center in the sea was under Microsoft's Research Division and Cloud Operations & Innovation (CO+I) teams.

Both teams acted as the primary “investors” by allocating financial resources, engineering talent, and infrastructure capacity for high-risk, high-reward technological experiments.

Microsoft Data Center in Ocean Update 2025

On 21st April 2025, Microsoft announced how it had safely recovered the underwater data center after its two-year deployment. When the Northern Isles pod was scheduled for retrieval from the deep sea, Microsoft made sure that the data center remained fully connected and operational until the very moment it was brought back to land, ensuring no networking or data was lost during the process. 

Microsoft achieved this through a secure and dedicated network path using a leased line linking the subsea pod directly to the company's infrastructure hub in London.

Benefits & Lessons Learned

Project Natick was aimed at dramatically cutting down the cooling costs by replacing massive air-conditioning systems or evaporative cooling towers used in traditional land-based data centers with an underwater pod that naturally keeps the servers cool.

But beyond these direct technical benefits, Project Natick offered Microsoft valuable lessons to develop land-based or underwater data centers. It acts as a viable blueprint for future data center models, especially in an era where there is a growing demand for power and housing compute infrastructure. Instead of dedicating vast acres of land to new data centers, Natick demonstrated how compact, self-contained modules can deliver high-density compute in a more environmentally friendly way.

Conclusion

One of the most ambitious and unusual data center initiatives ever is Microsoft's Project Natick. The study showed that sealed, nitrogen-filled conditions and naturally cold seawater can make servers far more reliable, cool them down more efficiently, and make them last longer by putting a fully functional data center on the ocean floor. The two-year deployment yielded remarkable outcomes, demonstrating that underwater data centers may function with minimum upkeep and significantly lower failure rates.

Despite the project being successful, the project officially ended in 2024. Microsoft cited several reasons for discontinuation, such as the concept of underwater data centers is not feasible for modern cloud and AI demands. 

Underwater pods remain sealed for years, making it difficult to upgrade the GPUs or add new servers to meet the growing demand or expand capacity. In addition, challenges like maintenance and costly deployment, and low retrieval costs made the project impractical to operate at hyperscale. Thus, Project Natick succeeded as an experiment; it was not deployed as a long-term project.

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