Microsoft will pilot a new data centre design next year which optimises AI workloads and consumes zero water for cooling.
By adopting chip-level cooling solutions, Microsoft
can deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation.
While water is still used for administrative purposes like restrooms and kitchens, this design will avoid the need for more than 125 million litres of water per year per data centre, according to Steve Solomon, Microsoft’s vice president of Data Centre Infrastructure Engineering.
He said these new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply.
“We measure water efficiency through Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) which divides total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment,” Solomon said.
“We are continually investing in improving the design and operation of our data centres to minimise water use. In our last fiscal year, our data centres operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh.
“This represents a 39 per cent improvement compared to 2021, when we reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh. This WUE reduction is due to our ongoing efforts to actively reduce water wastage, expand our operating temperature range, and audit our data centre operations.”
Solomon said the company also expanded its use of alternative water sources, such as reclaimed and recycled water, in Texas, Washington, California, and Singapore.
“We have been working since the early 2000s to reduce water use and improved our WUE by 80 per cent since our first generation of data centres. As water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do,” he said.
The shift to next generation data centres is expected to help reduce WUE to near zero for each data centre employing zero-water evaporation.
“As our fleet expands over time, this shift will help reduce Microsoft’s fleetwide WUE even further,” Solomon said.
Traditionally, water has been evaporated on-site to reduce the power demand of the cooling systems. Replacement of evaporative systems with mechanical cooling will increase power usage effectiveness (PUE).
The latest chip-level cooling solutions will allow Microsoft to utilise warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of IT hardware.
This mitigates power use with high efficiency economising chillers with elevated water temperatures.
“The result is a nominal increase in our annual energy usage compared to our evaporative data centre designs across the global fleet. Additional innovations to provide more targeted cooling are in development and are expected to continue to reduce power consumption,” he said.
Microsoft's data centre fleet covers 300+ facilities in 34 countries.
Pilot project timeline
Although Micosoft’s current fleet will still use a mix of air-cooled and water-cooled systems, new projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will pilot zero-water evaporated designs in 2026.
Starting August 2024, all new Microsoft data centre designs began using this next-generation cooling technology, as the software giant works to make zero-water evaporation the primary cooling method across its portfolio. These new sites will begin coming online in late 2027.