The impressive images of the data center are located at a depth of 35m on the seabed of Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft has placed a seabed data center near Scotland's Orkney island to test the ability to provide Internet services to coastal cities faster by using renewable energy.

The data center is called the Northern Isles, which is part of the Natick Project, which has been undertaken by the company's Artificial Intelligence and Research division since 2014. Located at a depth of 35 meters below the seabed, the This data center works by renewable energy through a marine cable route running from Orkney.

Natick is a project established to deploy large-scale data centers anywhere in the world within 90 days.

Normally, the time to complete a data center takes about 1 to 2 years, too long in the context of more and more activities in the world being posted on the Internet. Therefore, researchers have sought to accelerate this process.

Last year, Microsoft built a sample tank in California's waters called Leona Philpot - a character in the Xbox's Halo game. The sample tank was tested for 105 days.

At the end of the trial, Leona Philpot was confirmed to be water resistant. So, Microsoft started deploying the Northern Isles data center on the seabed off Scotland. Leona Philpot has a maximum operating time of 5 years.

In Orkney there is a large renewable energy research center, which is one of the reasons Microsoft puts Leona Philpot near the island.

Northern Isles undersea data center was built by Microsoft and Naval Group, a French company.

Naval Group, with experts on the seabed construction industry, has applied a heat exchange process to build an outer shell covering 864 servers and cooling infrastructure systems. This crust is made in France and then shipped to Scotland.

Microsoft's Northern Isles data center is more than 12m long, much smaller than most other data centers.

Northern Isles can store up to 5 million movies.

This data center is attached to a platform filled with stone ballast and pulled into the water.

Once in position and partially submerged, it will be attached to the fiber optic cable that runs from Orkey and is started.

The image of the data center when sinking completely into the water.

 

Engineers had to use up to 10 winches, a crane, a crane containing a crane, and a remote control vehicle to take this data center down to a depth of more than 35m on the seabed.

In the following year, Microsoft researchers will monitor this data center, monitor its energy consumption, internal humidity, sound level and temperature.

This underwater data center is just a research project so it won't be popular.

Whether the experiment is successful or not, the researchers will learn many things and may have unpredictable results.

See more:

1. Admire Google's monumental data centers
2. The largest data centers on the planet
3. Rare photo series about Google's data center