Microsoft has launched a new data centre design aimed at reducing water usage and contributing to a sustainable future. The design, introduced in August 2024, employs chip-level cooling technology to eliminate the need for water evaporation in cooling processes.
The initiative is part of Microsoft’s ‘Datacenter Community Pledge’, which focuses on supporting local economies and protecting watersheds in areas with increasing water stress.
Making this announcement on LinkedIn, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, said, “AI depends on water—and so do we.”
The new cooling system uses a closed-loop process that recycles water continuously between servers and chillers, eliminating the need for a freshwater supply after initial setup.
Suleyman noted that each data center would save 125 million litres of water per year. While water will still be used for administrative purposes such as restrooms and kitchens, cooling-related water consumption will be eliminated.
Improvement in Water Efficiency Metrics
Microsoft measures water efficiency using Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which compares annual water consumption for cooling and humidification against energy consumption for IT equipment.
“In our last fiscal year, our data centres operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh,” said Steve Solomon, VP of datacenter infrastructure engineering at Microsoft. “This represents a 39% improvement compared to 2021 when we reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.”
This progress follows years of investment in expanding operating temperature ranges and auditing data centre operations.
Since the early 2000s, Microsoft claims to have reduced its WUE by 80% and continues to implement innovative cooling methods. The zero-water evaporation design is expected to bring WUE for these data centres to near-zero levels, further reducing the fleetwide WUE as the company expands.
Lenovo also launched its sixth-generation Neptune cooling system ThinkSystem N1380 Neptune, a water-cooling system built to support NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform and AI applications.
Trade-offs in Energy Consumption
Replacing evaporative systems with mechanical cooling is expected to increase energy usage. However, advancements in chip-level cooling allow the systems to operate at higher temperatures, mitigating the power demand.
Microsoft also claims that it is exploring targeted cooling innovations to offset the nominal rise in energy consumption.
“Additional innovations to provide more targeted cooling are in development and are expected to continue to reduce power consumption,” the company stated in the official blog.
The tech giant also claims that pilot projects for zero-water evaporative cooling systems are scheduled for 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin.
Microsoft plans to integrate the technology into all new data centre designs, which started in August 2024, with new facilities expected to be operational by late 2027.
