Microsoft has announced the launch of a new design for its data centers, optimizing artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and avoiding water consumption for cooling. The technology supports the company's sustainability goals focused on data centers, it reports esgtoday.com.
Earlier this year, the tech giant announced its Datacenter Community Pledge program, which aims to help reduce the growing footprint of data centers and address societal challenges and create benefits in local communities.
Data centers generate a tremendous amount of heat and typically use chilled water to absorb the heat. According to experts, an average-sized data center uses about 300 gallons of water per day, the same amount used by 000 US households. This puts data centers among the top 1000 commercial and industrial water users.
The new data center projects
Microsoft has announced that new data center projects to be built in Phoenix, Arizona and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin will pilot cooling systems that do not consume water. These new data centers are the first to use next-generation cooling technology that avoids water evaporation. According to the company, this will save up to 125 million liters of water per year per data center.
All of the company's new data center designs have begun using the new cooling technology. Microsoft states that the new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop – water is filled into the system when the data center is under construction, and this water will continuously circulate between the servers and coolers to dissipate heat without fresh water supply is required.
Tech giant Microsoft also adds that it has taken other steps to reduce water consumption. Based on the measurement of water use efficiency (WUE), the company's efforts improved this metric in the last fiscal year by 39% compared to the amount used in FY2021.
These savings are fueled in part by the expanded use of alternative water sources, such as reclaimed and recycled water, in data centers in Texas, Washington, California and Singapore.
“We have been working since the early 2000s to reduce water use and have improved our WUE by 80% since our first generation of data centers. As water challenges become more extreme, we know we have more work to do. The move to next-generation data centers is expected to help reduce WUE to near net zero for each data center using zero water evaporation. As our fleet expands over time, this change will help further reduce Microsoft's fleet WUE,” commented Steve Solomon, vice president, Data Center Infrastructure Engineering at Microsoft.
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