Overview Carbon Water Waste Ecosystems Appendix 24 Enabling systems change Research and development Catalyzing Researchers at Microsoft are charged with inventing the 1/8th future of Microsoft and addressing societal challenges. With that mandate, teams around the globe are Failure rate of undersea innovation and developing new technology approaches aimed at servers compared providing better performance than today’s state-of-the- with land-based art, while also using energy and materials more control group. collective action efficiently. Research ideas being explored include Project Natick evaluates radically different datacenter architectures, use of novel the benefits that materials and techniques to store and transport data, underwater datacenters and more computationally- and energy-efficient methods have on reliability, We are focused on new ways to for training and deriving predictions from AI models. efficiency, and sustainability. harness the power of technology, partnerships, investments, and policy Jonathan Banks. Datacenter systems In July 2020, Project Natick retrieved its underwater to drive impact at scale and pace to datacenter from the sea floor off Scotland’s Orkney help the world get to carbon zero. Islands. This project had previously demonstrated the feasibility of undersea deployment. Its latest phase evaluated practical concerns, with many promising learnings for environmental sustainability: • Servers failed at one-eighth the rate of a land-based control group—prolonging the life of the computers and reducing the need for replacement components and materials. • Cold seawater can be used for cooling servers— without detectable temperature impact a few meters downstream, without tapping critical freshwater resources, and with greater cooling efficiency than air. • The datacenter ran reliably on a renewable energy grid supplied 100 percent by wind, solar, and experimental green energy technologies. It also provided an attractive location for sea life—it was quickly colonized by multiple species of fish and other sea life.