Microsoft announced the launch of a new datacenter design, optimizing AI workloads and avoiding the consumption of water for cooling, supporting the company’s datacenter-focused sustainability goals.

The announcement follows the release by Microsoft earlier this year of its “Datacenter Community Pledge,” aimed at ensuring that the company’s growing datacenter footprint serves helps to address societal challenges and create benefits in local communities. The pledge included a commitment  to “design and operate our datacenters to support society’s climate goals and become carbon negative, water positive and zero waste before 2030.”

Datacenters generate a great deal of heat, and generally use a chilled water circuit to absorb the heat generated by equipment. According to experts, the average mid-sized data center in the US utilizes around 300,000 gallons of water a day – as much as is used by 1,000 US households, making data centers alone among the top ten commercial and industrial users of water in the country.

Microsoft said that its new datacenter projects to be built in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, will pilot cooling systems that do not consume water. These new datacenters are the first ones that will be based on new designs that use a next-generation cooling technology that avoids water evaporation, which the company says will save as much as 125 million liters of water per year per datacenter. The new sites will begin coming online in late 2027, Microsoft said, and all new Microsoft datacenter designs have begun using the new cooling technology.

According to Microsoft, the new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Water is filled into the system when the data center is under construction, and that water will continually circulate between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply.

In addition to the new cooling design, Microsoft said it has been taking other steps to reduce water usage. Based on its Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) measurement, its efforts improved water use efficiency in its last fiscal year by 39% over the amount used in FY 2021. Those savings, Microsoft said, were in part fueled by expanded use of alternative water sources, such as reclaimed and recycled water, in data centers in Texas, Washington, California, and Singapore.

In a post highlighting the new design, Steve Solomon, Vice President, Datacenter Infrastructure Engineering at Microsoft, said:

“We have been working since the early 2000s to reduce water use and improved our WUE by 80% since our first generation of datacenters. As water challenges grow more extreme, we know we have more work to do. The shift to the next generation datacenters is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero for each datacenter employing zero-water evaporation. As our fleet expands over time, this shift will help reduce Microsoft’s fleetwide WUE even further.”