Microsoft claims to have created a blueprint for how datacentres hosting artificial intelligence (AI) workloads can be designed without needing water for cooling purposes.
The public cloud giant shared details of the design in a blog post that further claims its design could eradicate the need for its datacentres to consume more than 125 million litres of water to keep them cool.
The design consists of a closed-loop setup that is filled with recycled water during the datacentre’s construction phase, and will then be used to continually circulate water around the facility’s servers and chillers to dissipate heat without the need for a fresh water supply to be used at any point.
As detailed in the blog, Microsoft’s current fleet of datacentres still use water for cooling purposes, combined with air-cooled systems, but it has plans to pilot its new design in 2026 at two of its US sites. It is, however, the company’s intention to roll out the technology to all its sites in due course.
“Starting August 2024, all new Microsoft datacentre designs began using this next-generation cooling technology, as we work to make zero-water evaporation the primary cooling method across our owned portfolio,” the blog post continued. “These new sites will begin coming online in late 2027.”
Microsoft also mentioned elsewhere in the blog post that investing in innovations that will minimise the amount of water its datacentres consume is a priority for the organisation, with the company reporting double-digit improvements in its sites’ water usage during the last financial year.
“We measure water efficiency through [the] Water Usage Effectiveness [WUE] metric, which divides total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment,” the blog post continued.
“In our last fiscal year, our datacentres operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh [and] this represents a 39% improvement compared to 2021, when we reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.”
In September 2020, the company also pledged to embark on a series of actions to ensure it replenishes more water than its entire operations consume by 2030.
This was on the back of the water consumption habits of datacentres coming under increased scrutiny from government policy-makers and environmentalists, in the wake of predictions that climate change and population growth would lead to increased water scarcity in drought-prone regions of the world.
Microsoft has also made a series of announcements in recent years about the work it is doing to minimise the environmental footprint of its datacentres in other ways, including a disclosure in November 2024 about its plans to effectively build wooden server farms.
As reported by Computer Weekly at time, the company said it has two facilities under development in Northern Virginia that will feature cross-laminated timber as part of their design as part of its work to reduce the amount of embodied carbon used to build its datacentres.
This work has led to it trialing the use of microalgae-based limestone in the foundations for its server farms, along with other concrete mixes that feature materials such as ash and slag, alkaline soda ash and biogenic limestone.
The company has also previously trialled the use of underwater server farms, although these trials are known to have now concluded with Microsoft opting not to proceed with building any sub-sea facilities.
