Microsoft has shared its plans to make its data centers more sustainable, tackling issues such as carbon emissions, waste and the use of water for cooling, which it will reduce by 95 percent in the next three years.
The company has proposed to reduce water use by 95 percent in data center cooling by 2024, that is, by about 5.7 billion liters per year, as reported on its official blog.
The cooling system helps maintain the performance and reliability of servers in warmer temperatures. The new approach will determine higher set points in different climates for evaporation systems.
According to Microsoft, this approach would be fully implemented by 2024, eliminating the use of water for cooling in data regions such as Amsterdam, Dublin, Virginia and Chicago, and reducing its need by 60 percent in desert areas such as Arizona.
Research in waterless liquid cooling has led the company to focus on the concept of ‘overclocking’, that is, a practice that allows increasing the clock frequency of an electronic component to increase its performance above preset parameters.
In this sense, Microsoft has detected that they can increase the performance of the chips by 20 percent with liquid cooling, at higher cooling temperatures, also reducing the need for water for said cooling. This, they point out from the company, “unlocks a new potential for the design of data center racks”.
Likewise, the company understands that the design of a data center must be aligned with the characteristics of the environment in which it is located, such as native species, temperatures and rainfall.
Photo: microsoft
The project he is developing in the Netherlands, in the Amsterdam data center region, will involve the construction of wooded areas of lowlands and wooded wetlands, with suitable vegetation to filter water from rain and runoff, with the objective of to restore ecosystem performance.
Microsoft has also noted that they build 50 to 100 new data centers each year, which has an impact on carbon emissions, mainly due to the carbon embedded in steel and concrete.
To reduce them, they have used the tool ‘Calculator of carbon incorporated in construction’ (EC3), of the non-profit organization Building Transparency. With it, the company claims to have found opportunities to reduce the carbon incorporated in concrete and steel by 30-60 percent.
Along with the design and construction of more sustainable data centers, the company has also discussed its first circular centers, with which it seeks to extend the life cycle of servers and reuse them to reduce waste.
The company’s plans are to extend these circular centers to new cloud computing assets to achieve a reuse of 90 percent.
It also announced the public preview of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, a specialized cloud that offers organizations the ability to access a comprehensive, integrated and automated set of knowledge to accelerate each stage of their sustainability journey.
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