Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
Microsoft seeks sustainable data center development
Microsoft's data center in Wyoming / Courtesy of Microsoft Korea
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
Microsoft has announced a plan to meet its carbon negative goals by 2030. In line with this, the tech giant has been conducting extensive research and investing to make data center operations more eco-friendly.
Based on its research results, the company announced recently how it will reduce water use and carbon emissions at data centers.
First of all, Microsoft said it will reduce the amount of water used globally in its evaporative cooled data centers by 95 percent, or an estimated 5.7 billion liters annually, by 2024.
“Through our extensive global research on server performance in warmer temperatures, we're able to create higher set points for a variety of different climates for when water-based, evaporative cooling is necessary to preserve server performance and reliability,” the company said.
“We expect this project to be fully implemented by 2024, and it has the potential to eliminate water use for cooling in regions like Amsterdam, Dublin, Virginia and Chicago, while reducing water use in desert regions like Arizona by as much as 60 percent.”
The company is also conducting research and development activities for waterless cooling options and liquid immersion cooling. By using alternate cooling systems, the company found that for some chipsets, performance can be increased by 20 percent.
The company also emphasized that it puts importance on supporting local ecosystems in which it operates data centers all over the world.
Microsoft said it has been benchmarking the ecosystem performance in 12 data center regions, to be completed by the end this year. Through this research, it will quantify ecosystem-friendliness in terms of water quantity and quality, air, carbon, climate, soil quality and many other indexes.
Regarding the company's effort Microsoft Korea CEO Ji-eun Lee said, “We are holding ourselves accountable by looking at all of Microsoft's data center operations through a critical lens to understand and measure our carbon footprint. We believe that this new approach to our data centers will help us reach our goals and have a wider impact on the planet.”
Including the plan to have sustainable eco-friendly data centers, Microsoft has been pushing for achieving carbon neutrality in its other business operations.
In January 2020, the company announced it aims to go “carbon negative” by 2030, meaning that by that date it will be removing more carbon from the environment annually that it emits. By 2050, the company also plans to remove from the environment all the carbon that it has emitted directly or through electricity use since the company was founded in 1975.
Microsoft reported in January that from 2020 to 2021 it had reduced its carbon emissions by 6 percent or roughly 730,000 metric tons. Also, the company purchased carbon credits equivalent to a 1.3 million metric ton reduction in pollution.