- The zero water evaporation system will virtually eliminate water use in data centers owned by Microsoft
- This will save tens of billions of liters of water during the life of the Microsoft PARC data centers.
- The key to delivering this solution was to implement chip level cooling solutions
Microsoft has introduced a new data center design that eliminates the need for evaporation of water in cooling, addressing concerns about the use of water in the regions that face scarcity and droughts.
This new cooling system, launched in August 2024, optimizes AI workloads by conserving water, and is part of the Microsoft data centers commitment, helping to support local communities and reduce the impact environmental.
The system works through the use of liquid cooling at the chip level, which provides a precise temperature control without depending on water evaporation. While water is still used for administrative needs, such as bathrooms and kitchens, the cooling system itself does not require fresh water.
Pilot sites will be live next year
The system works in a closed circuit, which means that water is continually distributed between servers and coolers without recovering. The closed circuit liquid cooling has been used by overclockers (including me) for years to maintain stable temperatures during workloads with resources, which makes it a natural adjustment for modern data centers with their intense demands of AI .
Water efficiency in data centers is measured by effectiveness of water use (WUE), which calculates water consumption in relation to energy use. Microsoft says that when moving to the cooling of closed circuit fluid, it hopes to save more than 125 million liters of water per year, by data center.
“We have been working since the beginning of the 2000s to reduce the use of water and improve our WUE by 80% from our first generation of data centers,” said Steve Solomon, vice president of Datacenter infrastructure infrastructure engineering, Microsoft, Microsoft .
“As the water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do. The change to the next generation data centers is expected to help reduce our WUE to almost zero for each data center used by the evaporation of zero water. As our fleet expands over time, this change will help further reduce Microsoft’s WUE worldwide. “
The new data centers in Phoenix, Arizona and Mount Plenant are operational in 2027.
Eliminating evaporative cooling increases the effectiveness of power use (PUE), since mechanical cooling requires more energy. However, the use of high efficiency economic coolers and high cooling temperatures will compensate part of this demand.
