In 2024, they cancelled it.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-confirms-project-natick-underwater-data-center-is-no-more/

Condensation

Honestly datacenters almost always benifit from being data sources, which mostly means population centers.

There is almost the cost of networking even if latency isnt a concern. There is just more line of sight with sats and fiber connection near existing places vs far off places.

More energy being spent cooling data centers on land ultimately heats up the whole system more, including the oceans. This is why you should pay attention in your physics class at school kids.

The project is set to use 30% less electricity and is powered by wind. Better than the Western approach of building data centers in deserts to waste scarce water for cooling for sure

I am far from expert on this, but I'm not sure that they will be sufficient to change the oceanic temps compared to the wider worldwide greenhouse effect. Every data centre is already adding heat and most are reliant upon fossil fuels. The AI operations excessively so. Definitely need to do the works of a job on climate change.

The heat of even huge datacenters in the ocean is irrelevant, compared to the caused by the energy generation needed for cooling datacenters on land. Energy needed for cooling in submarine servers is zero.

This is only a problem if the datacenters are not powered by renewables. Nearly all renewables are the result of solar energy, AKA photons, AKA heat that is hitting the Earth regardless of what we do with it. Solar panels are obvious, but even for wind, it's the result of the sun heating different regions of the atmosphere at different rates, converting thermal energy from the sun to kinetic energy in the air. A wind turbine converts some of this kinetic energy to electrical energy (which slows the air down ever so slightly), which is dissipated as heat mostly in the data center. The thing is, if the wind turbine didn't exist, whatever kinetic energy that would have been captured would directly be dissipated as heat anyway in the form of friction in the air. Renewables only move solar heat around, and doesn't generate heat of its own. Even with geothermal energy, where in theory you're bringing heat that was trapped in the Earth to the surface, the geothermal sources we can practically take advantage of are already so close to the surface they would have been released through simple conduction anyway.

It is only when you burn fossil fuels that you're actively generating heat that would otherwise have stayed as chemical energy. But even the heat from this not the actual concern, it's the byproducts it generates that cause solar energy that would have been released into space to be trapped in the atmosphere. The heat generated isn't even a rounding error compared to retaining even 1% more solar energy in the air. Same for nuclear where you're reducing the overall binding energy inside atom cores and the reduction in energy is equal to the heat generated.

I'm guessing they did a cost benefit analysis of all this before starting the project. :)

It'd be neat if data centers could also be desalination plants. IE, you extract the seawater, desalinate it, use it for cooling, then add the fresh water into the general water supply when it's done with. I'm sure there are probably many reasons why that wouldn't work though.

Rain World (2017)

We're giving a new meaning to primordial soup.

maintenance and part replacement was a major issue

That was my first thought: who's going to be the underwater IT guy?

Edit: as an interesting coincidence, I just interviewed an engineer today who has rescue diver on his resume with 16 years of diving experience

I get it, truly, but we've been dejecting heat to the ocean for a good while. Ocean water cools marine engines and equipment, and heck we use rivers to cool lots of things -- even reactors, which ends up back in the ocean. Data center cooling might be one of the more responsible uses because it's (hopefully) not leeching petroleum or radioactive byproducts into the water.

I'm actually a little more upset now than when I started this comment.

>:(

Yes and there is already a sun shining above ground so global warming is no problem either.. smh.

It was to study its effectiveness and sustainability iirc, not meant to be done for actual production at that point in time.

I guess one major downside is that if a component breaks, be it something simple like a capacitor, there is no easy way to replace it, so it has to be designed with that in mind.