Microsoft announced the release of a new datacenter design that maximizes AI workloads while eliminating water-based cooling, a step towards its larger sustainability objectives. This announcement follows the earlier unveiling of Microsoft’s “Datacenter Community Pledge” in this year, where the company stated its commitment to making sure that datacenters have a positive impact on societal and environmental challenges. The pledge is to design and operate data centers to support climate goals, be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.
Datacenters are the sources of huge amounts of heat and generally utilize chilled water circuits for cooling their equipment. A mid-sized datacenter in the U.S. uses an average of 300,000 gallons of water per day—equivalent to the amount used daily by 1,000 U.S. households. This puts datacenters in the list of the top ten water-using commercial and industrial facilities in the country. In response to this, Microsoft’s latest design introduces a revolutionary cooling system that does not rely on evaporation, promising to save much water.
This latest set of datacenters, built in Phoenix, Arizona and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin will be the first to take advantage of this revolutionary cooling technology. The two datacenters, slated to roll out late in 2027, will each annually conserve approximately 125 million liters of water. Moreover, Microsoft reports that the design for all new datacenter configurations already began integrating this new, novel approach for cooling.
It employs a closed-loop liquid cooling system. It uses water during the datacenter’s construction and continues to circulate between the servers and chillers for efficient heat dissipation without additional water intake. In contrast, most traditional systems have required constant, fresh water inputs for cooling purposes.
Microsoft has also been focusing aggressively on water usage reduction within datacenter operations. The company noted that its Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) metric, which measures datacenters’ water efficiency, stands at 39% higher from the last fiscal year to FY 2021. All these have been partly realized through using other sources of water, which included reclaimed and recycled waters used in Texas, Washington, California, and Singapore datacenters.
Steve Solomon, Vice President of Datacenter Infrastructure Engineering at Microsoft, has recently made a statement where he has highlighted the company’s progress and commitment. “We have been working since the early 2000s to reduce water use and improved our WUE by 80% since our first generation of datacenters. As water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do,” he said. Solomon said that bringing the next generation of datacenter will bring WUE to zero for facilities using the zero water evaporation technology. He added that as Microsoft expand its datacenter fleet it will continue to decrease its own overall water footprint.
Besides this, Microsoft has also been using alternative sources of water to achieve its sustainability goals. It has used reclaimed and recycled water to save millions of gallons and still keep its cooling operations at a high standard.
This new approach underlines how the company is dedicated toward technology growth and environmental stewardship at the same time. Being a significant contributor, such as powering AI, or cloud computing services, makes these datacenters face extreme levels of scrutiny about their level of environmental impact. Microsoft’s efforts seek not only to answer such needs but also set an expectation level for sustainability in the tech industries.
As the world grapples with growing water scarcity and climate challenges, Microsoft’s innovative datacenter cooling design represents a significant step forward. By reducing water consumption and improving efficiency, the company is advancing toward its goal of becoming water positive, carbon negative, and zero waste within the decade.