Comment by fragmede
Comment by fragmede 4 days ago
Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.
Comment by fragmede 4 days ago
Pedantically, Microsoft has actually submerged datacenters (UDC). Google's only tried pumping seawater for cooling.
It didn't work, it was an utterly terrible idea and they are almost certainly lying about the sentiment that it "worked". No ability to perform maintenance is a complete nonstarter. Communications and power is a nightmare to get right. The thermal management story sucks - just because you have metal touching water doesn't mean you have effective radiation of heat. Actually scaling it up is nearly impossible because you need thicker and more expensive vessels the bigger it gets. The problems go on and on.
They claim it did.
Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably - https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/pr...
> Among the components crated up and sent to Redmond are a handful of failed servers and related cables. The researchers think this hardware will help them understand why the servers in the underwater datacenter are eight times more reliable than those on land.
> “We are like, ‘Hey this looks really good,’” Fowers said. “We have to figure out what exactly gives us this benefit.”
> The team hypothesizes that the atmosphere of nitrogen, which is less corrosive than oxygen, and the absence of people to bump and jostle components, are the primary reasons for the difference. If the analysis proves this correct, the team may be able to translate the findings to land datacenters.
> “Our failure rate in the water is one-eighth of what we see on land,” Cutler said. “I have an economic model that says if I lose so many servers per unit of time, I’m at least at parity with land,” he added. “We are considerably better than that.”
that was in 2020, and so here in 2025 MS has underwater data centres around the world!
wait, no it doesn't. why would that be, d'you think
I don't think MS ever revealed enough information to answer that. For example, I haven't seen any explanation of how heat is transferred from the servers to the skin of the container. I can guess how they did it but I don't want to make any judgement based on guesses.
Cooling worked well, everything else sucked. https://www.itpro.com/infrastructure/data-centres/microsoft-...
Apparently Microsoft tried it and it worked, but they shelved it?
https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/servers/microsoft-shel...