Microsoft raises bar with water-saving data center design

And even without the fine details, Microsoft is providing a pretty good picture of what it’s doing. None of the equipment is a secret, just the configuration. And that alone serves as a good example for others.

“It’s a good sustainability story,” Howard said. The hyperscalers have impressive sustainability initiatives, and “if the leaders are going in a certain direction – which is all about being good community stewards and good stewards of natural resources – these are the things that kind of turn into trends.”

Microsoft’s community pledge

The most economical way to cool a facility is through evaporative cooling. It’s also the highest consumption method, which is how Microsoft found itself consuming hundreds of millions of liters of water to cool its data centers.

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

In its last fiscal year, Microsoft data centers operated with an average WUE of 0.30 L/kWh, a 39% improvement compared to 2021, when it reported a global average of 0.49 L/kWh.

There is a slight trade-off, however. Traditionally, water is evaporated to reduce the power demand for cooling water. Microsoft is replacing evaporative systems with mechanical cooling, which has a slight increase in power draw and thus would increase Microsoft’s power usage effectiveness (PUE), the metric used to measure the energy efficiency of data centers.