Submerging the Data Center

By SemiWiki

February 3, 2016

Did you know that Microsoft is testing a project (code-named Natick) to submerge Data Center underwater, using fibre optics to transfer data to land? That’s sounds weird, but the only reason to do so is power consumption. In fact existing data center built in the US already represent 2.5% of electricity consumed in the country, and with 60% growth in data traffic every year according to Cisco, this figure will severely grow in the future. So Microsoft Research is investigating whether it is possible to put data center deep under the sea. Does it sounds too rationale to deal with the root cause of the power issue and first work to optimize the very complexes multi-cores SoC used in data center?

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