It is reported that the U.S. Department of Defense awarded Microsoft the contract for an integrated visual reality enhancement (AR – Augmented Reality) system at a contract value of US $21.9 billion in March of this year. For national security reasons, industry insiders have revealed that the relevant cloud computing data center for this equipment will be constructed under the water. The initial contract value of the underwater data center (UDC) is expected to exceed US $500 million, which will also be the first large-scale commercial application since Microsoft launched the underwater data center (UDC) project in 2015 and announced its successful verification last year.

As early as 2015, the news that Microsoft had sunk its newest data center to the seabed attracted significant global attention. Affected by the COVID-19 and emission reductions over the past two years, all walks of life are seeking solutions featuring higher automation and lower energy consumption. Therefore, as an important marker on the road towards the ‘lights out data center’, the underwater data center will accelerate this commercial process.

The lights out data center is an unattended, fully automated data center facility. This brings about significant savings in energy and management costs. The underwater data center piloted and deployed by Microsoft has been unattended for nearly three years, but is still running smoothly. This result also indicates the future direction of the lights out data center.

The Natick project team for the Microsoft underwater data center deployed 12 server racks in a pressure vessel in 2018 and sank them to the seabed near the Scottish coast. Known as "SSDC-002", this was finally fished from the seabed in 2020. The data center runs 864 servers and 27.6 PB of storage devices, mainly handling the workload from the Azure cloud platform. The results show that the performance of these offshore underwater data centers is very positive, and that the reliability of the servers contained in the data center is 8 times that of their onshore equivalent.

To sum up, the underwater data center is certainly feasible in terms of logistics, environment and economy. However, technical maturity is required to support the layout of the underwater facility before large-scale application is possible. In recent years, Microsoft has been committed to studying how it can expand the scale and performance of these data centers by connecting them and combining their capabilities.

Analysis carried out by Frost & Sullivan, a security research institute, shows that continued global high-level technology deployment will undergo a surge in data creation, further increasing demands for data processing and storage capacity. As a result, a large number of data centers will be built, from enterprise scale to large clouds. It is estimated that by 2025, US $432.14 billion will be invested in the global data center market. Industry insiders believe that with this surge in demand, the underwater data center will usher in a wave of rapid growth after the successful deployment of the UDC project of the U.S. Department of Defense.