Microsoft has sunk an underwater data centre off the coast of Orkney to investigate the benefits of deploying sub-sea data centres around the world.

Data centres are power intensive and create a lot of heat, often needing a lot of energy to cool equipment. By running the data centre underwater, Microsoft hopes to save energy on cooling the structure.

The data centre, which is set to run for five years, is powered using renewable energy from nearby islands via an undersea cable, although once it is sunk it will be all but impossible to repair.

Dubbed Project Natick, the vessel is the second from Microsoft after it launched a similar project off the Pacific Coast. While it will not replace large-scale data centres, the second phase aims to show that Natick can manufacture and deploy a full-scale data centre in just 90 days.

Deployed off the coast of Scotland, Natick is tiny compared to the giant sheds that process much of the world's information. This centre has a mere 12 racks of servers, which has room to store five million movies.