Microsoft said yesterday it had submerged a second experimental data center off the coast of Scotland, as part of its Natick project that studies less energy-intensive data centers. While the idea in itself is a very good one—data centers consume huge amounts of energy for cooling—the environmental consequences of a wide adoption of such data centers are yet to be identified, and not all of them may be good. It’s all about temperatures, really. The notorious energy intensity of data centers was the main reason why Microsoft began working on Natick, whose goal is to study the “manufacturing and operating environmentally sustainable, prepackaged datacenter units that can be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate lights out on the seafloor for years.” The experimental data center is as large as a shipping container, at 12.2 m in length and a diameter of 3.18 m and contains 12 […]