Live feed of Microsoft’s underwater datacenter is strangely soothing

Microsoft has a pretty nifty way to store data: In an underwater datacenter, located off the coast of Scotland, capable of holding 27.6 petabytes of information. It’s part of Project Natick, the company’s testbed for the feasibility of underwater datacenters powered by offshore, renewable energy. 

The datacenter was sunk in June 2018, but now Microsoft has installed two underwater cameras that provide a live view at the sunken datacenter, as noticed by The Verge. 

Yes, you can now observe fish and other sea creatures swimming around a tank that contains a lot of data. 

Don’t expect to see anything wild; it’s basically fish frolicking around a big tank, and you have to trust Microsoft’s word that it holds 12 racks containing 864 standard Microsoft datacenter servers with enough storage for about 5 million films.

But there’s something calming about watching fish carelessly swim around something that, just a few decades ago, would’ve seemed like alien technology. That, and sometimes a fairly big fish enters the camera’s view, which is sort of cool. 

Microsoft put up the cameras to observe the environmental conditions around the datacenter, which is deployed within 12 nautical miles of land at a depth of “no more than 328 feet.” But let’s face it — they probably did it just because they can. 

Check out the cameras here and do let us know if you see a submarine hauling away the entire thing or anything fishy like that.