Researchers at Microsoft have been working on Project Natick, a Microsoft research project to manufacture and operate an underwater datacenter. Project Natick is focused on a cloud future that can help better serve Microsoft's customers in areas which are near large bodies of water (where nearly 50% of society resides). The vision of operating containerized datacenters offshore near major population centers anticipates a highly interactive future requiring data resources located close to users. Deepwater deployment offers ready access to cooling, renewable power sources, and a controlled environment.

Microsoft says that project Natick will allow the deployment of a datacenter from start to finish in just 90 days. In addition,with half of the world’s population lives within 200 km of the ocean, placing datacenters offshore increases the proximity of the datacenter to the population dramatically reducing latency.

Natick datacenters are envisioned to be fully recycled. Made from recycled material which in turn is recycled at the end of life of the datacenter. They waste no products, whether due to the power generation, computers, or human maintainers are emitted into the environment.

Microsoft is weighing coupling the data center with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity.

A prototype vessel, named as the Leona Philpot, operated on the seafloor about 1 kilometer from the Pacific coast of the U.S. from August to November 2015.

Project Natick is currently at the research stage. Microsoft is still evaluating whether this concept could be adopted and other cloud service providers.

Companies are finding some of the oddest locations for data centers these days. Facebook, for example, built a data center in Lulea in Sweden because the icy cold temperatures there would help cut the energy required for cooling. A proposed Facebook data center in Clonee, Ireland, will rely heavily on wind energy locally available. Google's data center in Hamina in Finland uses sea water from the Bay of Finland for cooling.