Microsoft Confirms the Closure of Its Underwater Data Center

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/microsoft-confirms-the-closure-of-its-underwater-data-center

by Bluestein • 1 year ago

33 20 1 year ago

duxup2• 1 year ago

Couldn't you get the cooling of the ocean from just pumping water through pipes in the ocean and then onto land? And if nitrogen was a big benefit, couldn't you do that on land too?

Not knocking the experiment, it seems very interesting / worth seeing what happens.

Bluestein3• 1 year ago

I am sure this has got to have been tried before ...

(Then again, pumping the water would consume some energy ...)

more_corn• 1 year ago

Yeah Google built a data center in an old paper mill in Norway. They use ocean water to cool the heat exchangers. It’s important not to let the salt water in. Things get a lot more difficult then.

duxup2• 1 year ago

I suspect it is similar underwater ;)

yencabulator• 1 year ago

Not sure if they built one in Norway too, but you might mean Finland. https://medium.com/@henrihapponen/the-coolest-data-center-in...

bawana• 1 year ago

I wonder if they can use the same cooling tower for their nuclear plant and their data center? Colocating fission reactors and datacenters might be a way to get some use out of all those empty malls resulting from amazonification.

Bluestein3• 1 year ago

This should become industry standard. Well thought out.-

dublin• 1 year ago

Hacker News is getting really useless. I thought I'd heard this some time ago, and yep, clicking through,this is indeed "news" that is OVER A YEAR OLD.

Are we just completely ignoring the "News" part of Hacker News now?

stevage3• 1 year ago

Good that this didn't become a trend. Oceans warming is one of the huge threats of climate change, we really don't need to help it.

2four2• 1 year ago

A data center is a near-zero contribution to ocean warming.

stevage3• 1 year ago

You know if you add enough small things together, they become a big thing, right?

burnt-resistor• 1 year ago

Where do you think most of the excess energy from anthropogenic climate change is being absorbed? It's measured on a scale of hundreds of 1e21 J, of which each 1 is 1 million 1 Mt nuclear bombs equivalent. We're already at +200 from 1993. Human activity is leading to massive changes in Earth's delicate systems, and data centers folks want to more than double energy production primarily for AI.

Mars008• 1 year ago

Add to that it was done in the North where ocean's cooling is needed for Golf stream to keep circulating.

EugeneG• 1 year ago

Don’t ever pee in the ocean … to avoid accelerating global warming

greatgib• 1 year ago

   Project Natick was a successful proof-of-concept, but now it's time for Microsoft to move on.

Corp-speak for a failure. If it was good, you would not stop it (after only 2 years) or not go on with the project in a visible way.

What I guess is that the thing was ok in terms of not being a giant disaster but it did not have any added value compared to a land based équivalent and the external factors costs like maintenance on the server, operating and monitoring the container, ... were terrible compared to a normal datacenter.

Microsoft Confirms the Closure of Its Underwater Data Center

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