Microsoft confirms Project Natick underwater data center is no longer active

Microsoft has confirmed that its Project Natick which had been quiet for a number of years but has continued to be referenced by media and other companies as an ongoing initiative is no longer active.

"I'm not building subsea data centers anywhere in the world," Noelle Walsh, the head of the company’s Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) division, said. "My team worked on it, and it worked. We learned a lot about operations below sea level and vibration and impacts on the server. So we'll apply those learnings to other cases."

When asked whether this was one of the learnings, and that Microsoft could have human-free data centers with robots, Walsh said: "We're looking at robotics more from the perspective that some of these new servers will be very heavy. How can we automate that versus having people push things around? We are learning from other industries on robotics, but we're also very cognizant that we need people. I don't want people worried about their jobs.”