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Microsoft's Datacenter Sustainability Push

• By Chris Paoli
• December 09, 2024

Microsoft has introduced a new water-saving datacenter design as part of its commitment to sustainability. The initiative aligns with the company's Datacenter Community Pledge, launched earlier this year, which emphasizes environmentally responsible operations and community engagement.

The new system design, launched in August 2024, optimizes artificial intelligence workloads while eliminating water use for cooling, according to Microsoft. The cooling system replaces water evaporation with chip-level cooling technology, delivering precise temperature control through a closed-loop mechanism. While water remains necessary for administrative uses, such as restrooms and kitchens, the new design is projected to save more than 125 million liters of water annually per datacenter.

"As water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do," wrote Microsoft. "The shift to the next generation datacenters is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero for each datacenter employing zero-water evaporation."

The zero-water cooling system recycles water within a sealed loop, eliminating the need for fresh water supplies. Microsoft measures its progress using Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which assesses water consumption relative to IT energy use.

While the transition from evaporative cooling slightly increases power consumption, Microsoft's chip-level cooling solutions mitigate the impact by enabling higher temperature tolerances. This efficiency is further enhanced by advanced economizing chillers and ongoing development of targeted cooling innovations, said the company.

In its most recent fiscal year, Microsoft's datacenters reported an average WUE of 0.30 liters per kilowatt-hour, a 39 percent improvement from 2021. Since the early 2000s, the company has achieved an 80 percent reduction in WUE by adopting measures such as alternative water sources, wider temperature operating ranges, and thorough audits of datacenter operations, according to the company's metrics.

Pilot projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, are set to implement the zero-water cooling system starting in 2026, with operations commencing in late 2027. Microsoft has committed to making this technology the standard for its new datacenters.

Microsoft Builds Carbon-Efficient Datacenter
In another move towards sustainabe datacenters, Microsoft last month announced that two future datacenters in northern Virginia will incorporate cross-laminated timber (CLT) into datacenter designs to cut carbon emissions from traditional materials like steel and concrete.

According to Microsoft, the use of CLT -- a prefabricated, fire-resistant wood material – will reduce the embodied carbon footprint of these facilities by 35 percent compared to steel construction and 65 percent compared to precast concrete. Lighter and quicker to install, CLT represents a practical step forward in green building, said the company.

The new datacenters will help to reach lofty carbon goals the company has set for itself:

Microsoft's hybrid datacenters are the latest examples of how it is working to decarbonize its datacenter and construction operations. In 2020, Microsoft unveiled ambitious sustainability goals: By 2030, it would be “carbon negative” – meaning it would take more carbon out of the atmosphere than it emits. And by 2050 it would remove from the atmosphere the equivalent of all the carbon the company has emitted since its founding in 1975.

While CLT is still a niche, higher-cost option, Microsoft aims to drive its adoption by incorporating it into large-scale projects and pushing the construction industry toward greener alternatives.