Dec. 11, 2024 3:45p
(WPR)---Microsoft’s data center development in Mount Pleasant will be among the first in the world to use a new closed-loop system to recycle water — a move the company says “significantly reduces the need for fresh water.”
The new design will save around 91 million liters of water per year per data center in Mount Pleasant, according to Steve Solomon, Microsoft’s vice president for Datacenter Infrastructure Engineering.
“These new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop,” Solomon wrote about the new technology. “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.”
A spokesperson for Microsoft said its Mount Pleasant data center development will be one of the first in the globe to use the technology by 2026.
Water is required to operate data centers for cooling purposes and to produce electricity. Large data centers use between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water each day, according to The Washington Post.
The technology means Microsoft’s data centers in Mount Pleasant will have a “peak daily use of approximately 350,000 gallons per day which would only hit during the hottest days of the year,” Solomon wrote in an email to WPR.
“We only use water for cooling during the months of May through September then this water drops to zero for cooling months October through April,” Solomon continued. “This sustainable approach ensures that only a small portion of the facility uses water for cooling, and only during very warm temperatures.”
An artificial intelligence data center is built on land once slated for development by Foxconn in Mount Pleasant on Wednesday, May 8, 2024, in Mount Pleasant, Wis. Angela Major/WPR
Sara Walling, water and agriculture program director at Clean Wisconsin, said she’ll wait to see the results of the new technology.
“We just haven’t seen a lot of those systems in use, and so I think there’s some concern of ours that the systems are actually going to be able to operate the way they’re intended,” Walling told WPR.
Solomon said the facilities will also use water in restrooms and kitchens.
“Beyond these uses, Microsoft does not anticipate significant water usage in other areas of the facility,” Solomon said.
Sean Ryan, communications director for the village of Mount Pleasant, said the announcement “helps the village and the region advance their long-term goals.”
Microsoft announced a $3.3 billion investment for its Mount Pleasant data center development earlier this year. Construction is already underway for the project, which is on land once slated for development by Foxconn.
The plans have been praised by some in the community, but the project will likely include only a fraction of the 13,000 jobs Foxconn promised the community in 2017.
Ryan Harkins, the senior director of public policy for Microsoft, told WPR earlier this year that data centers are housed in “warehouse size facilities.” He also said engineers and “other employees” will work onsite to manage and maintain the facility.
Over the summer, Microsoft said it plans to “replenish more water than we consume locally” at its data centers by 2030. Walling praised those plans but said other tech companies who come to Wisconsin to build data centers might not have the same approach.
“I can’t say that the same mentality exists across all of the tech companies that are going to look to site data centers within this part of the country,” Walling said.
The U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy said data centers are one of the most “energy-intensive building types” and consume 10 to 50 times the amount of energy per floor space of a typical office building. Some of the largest data centers require more than 100 megawatts of power capacity, or enough to power around 80,000 households.
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