The data centers and servers They are a bottomless well of water. They are also the whiting that bites its tail. Companies increasingly need more to carry out calculations as complex and heavy as those of the artificial intelligencebut these need water to cool and function properly. And it is something that clashes with the environmental objectives that those same companies have for 2030 and 2050.

They also consume a ton of energy (so much so that there are companies like Google either Goal what are they going to use nuclear energy to fuel your needs), and in this search for solutions, Microsoft believes it has found the key: a closed circuit through which water circulates so as not to waste a single drop.

Lots of water. This high water consumption is necessary if we want to maintain current services and continue increasing data centers for future needs. Heat is the worst enemy of processors and liquid cooling is something that we can use on a small scale in home equipment. In data centers everything is big and solutions are being explored such as submerge servers in bathtubs either install them on the ocean floor, directly.

In any case, water consumption is so high that, for example, Google wanted to set up a data center in Chile and was blocked due to disproportionate spending in water it was going to make: 7.6 million liters of drinking water per day.

new generation. Microsoft is another of the heavyweights in this field and has also been looking for years to better cool its servers. Some time ago, they tried something that seemed crazy in one of Azure’s data centers in Washington: submerging them in tanks in which a liquid is boiling at a constant temperature.

The new solution seems somewhat more sustainable and involves a redesign of these server facilities. In a releasethe company has commented that in August of this year it created a redesign of its data centers to optimize water consumption in its servers that are responsible for giving life to AI. The key is liquid cooling that relies on a closed loop and they say that, once the system is filled during the construction process, water will continuously circulate between the servers to dissipate heat without the need for an additional supply.

Zero water. Currently, each Microsoft data center needs 125 million liters of water per year, an outrage that the new design will seek to reduce. In recent years they have been stepping up their game and, for example, they went from 0.49 L/kWh in 2021 to 0.30 L/kWh in the last fiscal year, an improvement of 39%. The goal is to consume even less water and, directly, they talk about avoiding that supply of fresh water once the server is built.

2026. Now, it is something that will begin to be seen little by little. Microsoft has commented that the current fleet of servers still mixes liquid and water dissipation systems, but these new zero consumption designs will begin to be tested in projects in Phoenix, Arizona, Wisconsin and Mount Pleasant. Once they assess the result, they will implement it en masse and the results should begin to be seen in 2027.

Global project. In the end, Microsoft is not alone in this. One example is Lenovo, whose research and design center in North Carolina we visited last year to check how they are reducing water and energy consumption when dissipating the servers. An example is that the servers themselves contribute to this circular economy, using part of the hot water for heating and hot water in the building, but also for swimming pools and other uses.

It is clear that companies are going to have to switch to these types of solutions if they want to achieve their environmental objectives in a panorama in which the growth of servers (for all the tasks they perform, not just AI calculations) seems to be slow. have an end

Images | Microsoft