A week after Tencent decided to build a data center in a cave, tech giant Microsoft have announced that they will be deploying an underwater data center at Orkney Islands, Scotland. With this move, Microsoft aims to provide environmentally and economically sustainable data center services to businesses in the region.
According to Microsoft, data center services take up a lot of energy and it is about time organizations look at economically feasible solutions to deploy data centers. They claim that in order to bring this thought to fruition, leveraging environmental resources are vital.
By deploying an underwater data center at Orkney Islands, Microsoft claim that they won’t have to worry about frequent maintenance since the sea’s naturally icy waters are expected to provide more than enough cooling for the system. They say that the data center, which features 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage, will be connected to land by a cable that provides a fiber connection as well as power.
Speaking about this data center launch, a spokesperson for Microsoft said:
Data centres are the backbone of the internet, and as demand for data centre resources across the computing industry grows exponentially, we need a solution to data storage that provides both the speed people expect and solutions that are more environmentally sustainable.
Microsoft say that they have christened this project as ‘Project Natick’, which aims to better Scotland’s economy and establish the country as a destination for business investments. In closing, they say that this hub will be an example for many other initiatives going ahead.