Is the cloud headed underwater? Why Microsoft thinks it's possible The company left a tube full of computer servers on the ocean floor for two years. Dec. 22, 2020 5:00 a.m. PT Microsoft has wrapped up a two-year experiment testing the sustainability of underwater data centers. And the results suggest our data could lie under the sea in the not too distant future. In the spring of 2018, team members from Project Natick deployed a massive tube filled with nitrogen in 117 feet of water off Scotland's Orkney Islands. Inside were racks of running computer servers that team members monitored for the next two years. They wanted to see if a controlled environment, free of corrosive oxygen and humidity, as well as bumps and shakes from human interaction, increased server reliability.