Microsoft has quietly shelved its underwater data centre project, dubbed Project Natick, according to an interview with the company’s head of cloud operations.

The Project Natick trial was launched in 2013 to explore the possible benefits of data centres located underwater such as lower latency for its users and dramatically reduced cooling costs.

Cooling in particular makes up a significant proportion of the energy used in a data centre – almost as much as the power used by the IT equipment. Due to the higher density of water and its ability to transport heat more effectively than air, deep-sea data centres are much more efficient than those on land.

In the decade since the trial began, Microsoft deployed a prototype in 2015 and then a test system off the coast of Scotland in 2018. The Scottish deployment stayed underwater for two years and even played a role in crunching data loads for vaccine research. It was lifted out of the water in July 2020 and retrieved for analysis. Since then...