Microsoft raises bar with water-saving data center design

And even without the finer details, Microsoft gives a pretty good idea of ​​what it does. No hardware is secret, only the configuration. And this alone serves as a good example for others.

“It’s a good sustainability story,” Howard said. Hyperscalers have impressive sustainability initiatives, and “if leaders move in a certain direction—which is to be good stewards of the community and good stewards of natural resources—those are the things that kind of turn into trends.”

Microsoft’s Commitment to the Community

The most economical way to cool a facility is evaporative cooling. This is also the highest consumption method, which is why Microsoft consumes hundreds of millions of liters of water to cool its data centers.

Microsoft measures water efficiency with a metric called water usage efficiency (WUE), which divides the total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption of IT equipment.

Last fiscal year, Microsoft data centers operated at an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh, a 39% improvement from 2021, when the company reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.

However, there is a slight trade-off. Traditionally, water is evaporated to reduce the energy requirement for cooling water. Microsoft is replacing evaporative systems with mechanical cooling, which will slightly increase power consumption and thus improve Microsoft’s Power Usage Efficiency (PUE), a metric used to measure the energy efficiency of data centers.