This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The artificial intelligence boom is driving unprecedented demand for data centers, raising concerns about their growing energy consumption, water use and carbon footprint. These challenges are making companies look beyond traditional land-based data centers.
Some developers are now exploring the ocean as a new location for AI infrastructure, hoping underwater data centers could improve energy use and cooling efficiency while using less fresh water and land area than onshore buildings. My research focuses on the societal, organizational and environmental implications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and the digital infrastructure—including data centers—that supports its development and deployment. I see underwater data centers as a promising new approach for supporting the growth of AI.
But moving servers into the ocean does not make other underlying environmental challenges, such as energy consumption and carbon emissions, disappear. It also creates new concerns about harm to the marine environment, as well as questions about how these data centers can be regulated—and how companies can maintain and expand them if needed. Whether underwater data centers can become sustainable alternatives to traditional data centers depends on solving these economic, technical and environmental problems.
In 2015, Microsoft launched a research project to explore the feasibility, benefits and challenges of underwater data centers. Part of that effort included setting up a waterproof data center on the seafloor near Scotland's Orkney Islands in 2018. It contained 864 servers and was connected to shore by an underwater cable.
After two years, Microsoft reported that the servers in the underwater data center failed at about one-eighth the rate of servers in comparable land-based data centers. The company is still studying the possible reasons but hypothesizes that, in a sealed underwater environment, the equipment is less exposed to oxygen, humidity and temperature fluctuations—as well as less jostling from people working to replace broken components. However, Microsoft ended the project in 2024 and chose not to build more underwater data centers.
The company didn't say why, but others' analyses suggest the reasons could include regulatory concerns, including the need for environmental permits, as well as a desire for faster upgrades and replacements for the computer equipment inside. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. Instead, the company has focused on land-based data centers, which can be larger and easier to expand and are also easier to access for repairs or equipment replacement.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
