Over the past year, the pace of AI adoption has accelerated dramatically, paving the way for breakthrough advances, discoveries and solutions that can help solve humanity’s biggest problems . We see this as a massive platform shift, like printing, which was not just an invention, but a technology that shaped a new economy. Alongside the incredible promise and benefits of AI, we recognize the resource intensity of these applications and the need to address environmental impact from all angles.
In line with our commitment to responsible AI and our ambitious sustainability commitments, we are determined to meet this challenge so that the world can harness the full benefits of AI. There are three areas where we are deeply invested and increasing our focus. THE First of all optimizes the energy and water efficiency of data centers. THE second advances low-carbon materials, creating global markets to help advance sustainability across all sectors. And the third improves the energy efficiency of AI and cloud services, providing our customers and partners with tools for collective progress.
1. Optimize energy and water efficiency in data centers
Over the past decade, our quest to innovate in every part of our cloud infrastructure to deliver more sustainable cloud services has led to many changes in the way we design, build and operate our data centers. As we continue this work, two of the biggest challenges we face are energy management and water intensity.
Energy management
The energy intensity of advanced cloud and AI services has pushed us to accelerate our efforts to improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption. Additionally, we have expanded our support to increase the availability of renewable energy, both for our own operations and for the communities in which we operate.
To continue improving data center energy management, we strive to reduce peak power, safely harvest unused energy, increase server density in existing data centers through intelligent use and allocation of energy-aware virtual machines, and improve efficiency right down to our chips and code.
Recognizing the need to continue to bring more renewable energy online, we currently have over 135 renewable energy projects in our portfolio of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) globally, a powerful mechanism to support the global energy transition. In the way we design, build and operate our data centers, we are focused on the path to 100% zero-carbon electricity, 100% of the time.
We are also working on solutions that enable data centers to return energy to the grid to contribute to local energy supplies during times of high demand. For example, in Ireland we have integrated batteries into wind turbines for wind power project to capture energy when the turbines are too efficient and supply it to the local network. In Denmark, excess heat created in a Microsoft data center will provide heat to the local community, producing enough heat to heat around 6,000 local homes. These two examples illustrate our work to use our data centers as a source of electricity to alleviate pressure on local power grids.
Water intensity
Currently, many data centers rely on water for two reasons: directly for cooling and indirectly for power generation. Although globally, total data center water consumption is relatively small, accounting for approximately 0.1% of national water consumption in the United States.1 We recognize the impact of data center operations on water stressed areas and we work to reduce this impact and design solutions that advance our progress on the water positive path.
We take a holistic approach to water reduction across our entire business, from design to efficiency, seeking immediate opportunities through operational use and, longer term, through design innovation to reduce, recycle and reuse water. We have had success using direct air instead of water to cool data centers, harvesting rainwater, and sourcing reclaimed water from utilities to reduce our reliance on water. fresh water. For example, in our Data centers in Swedenwe will use a process called free cooling, a simple and cost-effective method that results in a 30% reduction in energy costs and 90% less water consumption than standard systems.
2. Advancing low-carbon materials
For our future data centers and to contribute to industry-wide progress, we can also drive progress by helping to accelerate markets for low-carbon building materials. As a sector, construction materials such as steel and cement are currently among the largest contributors to the carbon cost of new construction, together producing around 13.5% of global carbon emissions.2
Green steel innovations3 and low-carbon cement are rapidly emerging, but these markets are still nascent and require significant investment to grow and bring supply online.
With our billion dollars Climate Innovation Fundwe invest to accelerate the development and deployment of new climate innovations, particularly for underfunded sectors and supply-constrained markets like low-carbon building materials. For example, we are investing in solutions such as H2 Green Steel to expand the market’s supply of near-zero carbon steel.4 which can produce up to 95% lower CO2 emissions than conventional steel. We are also evaluating the use of near-zero carbon steel in our own construction materials and equipment supply chains.
Likewise, we are working to expand the availability of low carbon concrete and other construction materials through commercial projects and collaboration with the world’s largest data center companies. In Washington state, our pilot program uses concrete alternatives such as biogenic limestone, fly ash and slag with the goal of reducing embodied carbon in concrete by more than 50% compared to traditional concrete mixes. With these investments, we aim to facilitate the commercialization of materials that can have a significant impact on reducing carbon emissions, for our own construction and for the industry in general.
3. Improve the energy efficiency of AI and cloud services
Reducing the energy needed to power AI and cloud services in the first place is another critical part of the solution. We strive to support developers and IT professionals with tools to optimize models and code, explore ways to reduce the energy requirements of AI, and harness the power of these technologies advanced to drive energy breakthroughs.
As a founding member of the Green Software Foundation, we collaborate with other leading organizations to help develop the field of green software engineering, contribute to industry standards, and work together to reduce carbon emissions software. Across our cloud services, we work to ensure that IT professionals have the information they need to better understand and reduce carbon emissions associated with their use of the cloud.
As the complexity of AI scenarios increases, we enable developers to create and optimize AI models that can achieve similar results while requiring fewer resources. Over the past few months we have released a suite of small language models (SLM) called “Phi” that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks, matching or outperforming models up to 25 times larger. Now available in the Azure AI Studio template catalog, Phi-2 provides a compact template for research and development or fine-tuning experimentation on various tasks.
We have learned that the complex sustainability challenges we face today are best solved through multidisciplinary, multi-sector collaboration, and energy breakthroughs are no exception. We recently collaborated with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) use advanced AI models to find new materials that can reduce reliance on traditional battery materials such as lithium. The team screened more than 32 million materials, discovered 500,000 stable candidates, and synthesized one promising candidate into a working prototype, shortening a process that can take years to days.
These highlights provide insight into our work to build and operate cloud services more sustainably, advancing solutions that can reduce the future impact of AI. Our ambitious 2030 goals to become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste and protect biodiversity require continued innovation in every aspect of our operations, and we are committed to sharing what we learn along the way. Stay tuned for more on this topic in the coming months.
Learn more:
To find out more, visit Microsoft Sustainability website and read the white paper Accelerating sustainability with AI. To learn how we’re integrating AI into our sustainability solutions, watch the digital event It’s AI. . . for sustainability.
Sources in footnotes:
1Data center water consumption | npj Clean water (nature.com)
2Cement and steel – nine steps towards net zero emissions (nature.com)
3What is green steel and how can it help us achieve net zero emissions? | World Economic Forum