Microsoft’s New Datacenter Design Uses No Water for Cooling

Microsoft, one of the biggest cloud service providers with hundreds of data centers around the world detailed yesterday a next-gen data center design that consumes no water for cooling. The company says that this new zero-water evaporated for cooling design could save more than 125 million liters of water per year per datacenter.

To save water, Microsoft is using new liquid cooling technologies to recycle water through a closed loop, all while precisely controlling the temperature of its servers. “Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply,” the company explained.

Microsoft’s new data center design still uses water for restrooms, kitchens, and other purposes unrelated to server cooling. However, the company expects that the shift to zero-water evaporation will help reduce its Water Usage Effectiveness, which is measured by dividing total annual water consumption for humidification and cooling by the total energy consumption for IT equipment to “near zero.”

The company also explained how it’s planning to mitigate the energy impact of its new chip-level cooling solutions that will replace evaporative systems in data centers. “The result is a nominal increase in our annual energy usage compared to our evaporative datacenter designs across the global fleet. Additional innovations to provide more targeted cooling are in development and are expected to continue to reduce power consumption,” the company explained.

Microsoft plans to start piloting zero-water evaporated designs in 2026 with new data center projects in Phoenix, Arizona, and Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin. While the company still uses a combination of air-cooled and water-cooled systems in its data centers across the world, the cloud giant wants zero-water evaporation to become the norm, and all of its new data center projects are now designed to use no water for cooling.