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According to a recent study, AI data centers could consume as much water annually as 1.3 billion people in Africa by 2030. Tech CEOs, however, continue to brush off such narratives. First, it was OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and now it's Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.
At the company’s Build conference this week, Nadella said Microsoft is taking a new approach to generate more power with less conversion loss at its new data centers. As part of that plan, it restructured how its cooling system and water consumption work.
“The cooling loop is filled once, and the data center can operate effectively with zero water consumption,” Nadella said. “The daily water usage over the course of an entire year is roughly equivalent to what a single restaurant would use.”
As Tom’s Hardware notes, most traditional data centers use evaporative cooling systems to keep their servers from overheating. This means that once the water used for cooling evaporates, these data centers need a fresh supply.
With its new closed-loop cooling system, however, Microsoft fills up water at its data centers during construction, and continually circulates it “between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply.” This approach saves 125 million liters of water per year per data center, the company said in late 2024.
How the new system translates to real-world benefits remains to be seen. It’s only being implemented at Microsoft’s newer data centers. The company has been operating hundreds of data centers worldwide for years.
Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that concerns around unsustainable water consumption for AI training are totally fake, pointing to the energy required to raise a human.