From
https://natick.research.microsoft.com/
Phase 1 demonstrated the feasibility of the subsea datacenter concept, including our ability to remotely operate a Lights Out datacenter* for long periods of time, operating with a highly efficient PUE (power usage effectiveness is total power divided by server power; lower values are better, 1.0 is perfect) of 1.07, and using no water at all, for a perfect WUE (water usage effectiveness is the liters consumed per megawatt of power per minute; lower values are better, 0 is best) of exactly 0 vs land datacenters which consume up to 4.8 liters of water per kilowatt-hour.
For Phase 2, our goals are to:
Develop one full scale prototype subsea datacenter, which could be used as a modular building block to aggregate subsea datacenters of arbitrary size
Gain an understanding of the economics of undersea datacenter TCO (total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of a datacenter including manufacture, deployment, operations, and recovery) should we proceed to commercial deployment.