Microsoft's new AI data center will spend zero liters of water on cooling

Microsoft has launched a new AI data center design that, apparently, uses zero liters of water for cooling. The Redmond tech giant is among the Big Tech that spends the most on resources like electricity in AI’s data center alongside Google.

The design, which idea started earlier this year, uses chip-level cooling tech that recycles water through a closed-loop system so that it minimizes water usage. It then contributes to a massive reduction in Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which Microsoft has been using since 2021 and improving by 39%.

Steve Solomon, Microsoft’s VP for data center infrastructure engineering, says, “The shift to the next generation datacenters is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero for each datacenter employing zero-water evaporation.”

Previously, Microsoft has launched its plan to procure 100% renewable energy on a global scale by 2025. And, by 2030, the Redmond company will “replenish more water than we consume locally.”

Building and testing a large language model (LLM) requires a lot of resources. One of them is data centers that can process the power, storage, and networking needed to train, test, and run these complex machine-learning models.

Last year alone, both Microsoft and Google consumed 24 TWh in electricity the whole year for the data centers. That’s more than literal countries like Iceland, Ghana, and others. On top of that, every year, a Microsoft data center spends an average of 125 million liters of water.

Another study also predicts a 160% increase in data center power demand by 2030 due to the rise of AI as data centers currently consume around 1-2% of global power. That percentage will rise by 3-4% by the end of the decade, and in an inevitable domino effect, will greatly impact increased carbon dioxide emissions.