This summer we released our Data Center Community Engagementdetailing our commitment to the local economies and communities in which we operate our data centers. Protecting local watersheds is an important part of this commitment, particularly in areas where water stress is increasing.
Starting in August 2024, Microsoft launched a new data center design that optimizes AI workloads and consumes no water for cooling. By adopting chip-level cooling solutions, we can ensure precise temperature control without water evaporation. Although water is still used for administrative purposes like toilets and kitchens, this design will avoid the need for more than 125 million liters of water per year per data center.*
Zero water evaporation and pursuit of ultra-low water use efficiency
These new liquid cooling technologies recycle water in a closed loop. Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and coolers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply.
We measure water efficiency using Water Use Efficiency (WUE)which divides the total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption of IT equipment. We continually invest in improving the design and operation of our data centers to minimize water consumption. During our last fiscal year, our data centers operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh. This represents a 39% improvement compared to 2021, where we reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh. This reduction in WUE is due to our continued efforts to actively reduce water waste, expand our operating temperature range, and audit our data center operations. We have also expanded our 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 consumption and have improved our WUE by 80% since our first generation of data centers. As water challenges become more and more extreme, we know we still have work to do. The move to next-generation data centers should help reduce our WUE to near zero for each data center using zero water evaporation. As our fleet expands over time, this change will help further reduce WUE across the Microsoft fleet.
Mitigating energy impacts
Traditionally, water was evaporated on site to reduce the energy demand of cooling systems. Replacing evaporative systems with mechanical cooling will increase our energy efficiency (PUE). However, our latest chip-level cooling solutions will allow us to use warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of computer hardware, allowing us to mitigate power consumption with efficient high-performance coolers. performance with high water temperatures.
The result is a nominal increase in our annual energy consumption compared to our evaporative data center designs across the global fleet. Additional innovations to provide more targeted cooling are under development and are expected to continue to reduce energy consumption.
Pilot projects and implementation
Although our current fleet will still use a mix of air- and water-cooled systems, new projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will test designs without water evaporation in 2026. Starting From August 2024, all new Microsoft data center designs have begun to use this next-generation cooling technology, as we strive to make waterless evaporation the primary cooling method in our entire portfolio. These new sites will go online at the end of 2027.
Advancing sustainability: sustainable by design
Learn more about how Microsoft is advancing cloud and AI sustainability with our blog series:
*Based on our FY2024 global average withdrawal WUE of 0.30 L/kWh.