Davy Jones’s data-centre
Building server farms underwater is less crazy than it sounds
EARLIER THIS year a ship hauled a large, barnacle-covered cylinder sporting a Microsoft logo from the seas off the Orkney islands. Inside were a dozen server racks, of the sort found in data-centres around the world. Sunk in 2018, and connected to the shore by cable, the computers had spent the past couple of years humming away, part of an experiment into the feasibility of building data-centres underwater.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Better down where it’s wetter”
From the September 19th 2020 edition
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