Microsoft is experimenting with methods to chop the quantity of metal and concrete it makes use of to construct its datacentres, by creating two services in Northern Virginia that may characteristic cross-laminated timber as a part of their design.
The software program large stated wood-based materials is “ultra-lightweight” and can enable it to chop the carbon emissions created as a by-product of extra typical datacentre builds.
The corporate additionally claims to be the primary hyperscale cloud supplier to be trialling the usage of the fabric, which it described as a “staple of low-carbon constructing” throughout Europe.
“The hybrid mass timber, metal and concrete development mannequin is estimated to considerably cut back the embodied carbon footprint of the 2 datacentres by 35% in comparison with typical metal development, and 65% in comparison with typical precast concrete,” stated Microsoft in a weblog put up.
“The sustainably harvested [cross-laminated timber] Microsoft is utilizing will displace a portion of the thick concrete usually used for flooring and ceilings [in datacentres]. The outcome will probably be a a lot lighter constructing requiring far much less metal, one other issue lowering the embodied carbon of the constructing.”
As acknowledged within the weblog put up, the usage of the fabric does come at a price, because it “nonetheless instructions a premium” and – as a result of it’s not as extensively utilized in the US – few development corporations have intensive expertise with utilizing it in large-scale tasks.
“On common, [cross-laminated timber] can improve materials prices by five-to-10% in comparison with conventional timber used to construct a single-family dwelling, although that may range based mostly on native market situations,” the weblog put up continued.
“However for giant tasks, like a headquarters or a datacentre, it may be cost-effective as a result of decreased development time, much less want for expert labour and economies of scale.”
The trial is a part of Microsoft’s ongoing push to develop into a carbon-negative entity by 2030, which includes embarking on sustainability-focused endeavours that imply its operations take extra carbon out of the environment than they emit.
As beforehand reported by Laptop Weekly, progress in the direction of attaining its objective has slowed, with Microsoft confirming in its Could 2024 annual sustainability report that its greenhouse fuel emissions for 2023 have been almost 30% larger than its 2020 baseline.
This isn’t the primary time Microsoft has sought out other ways to construct datacentres within the pursuit of sustainability features, having pioneered the thought in 2016 of constructing underwater server farms.
That undertaking concluded 4 years later, with the corporate releasing analysis findings in 2020 that concluded that underwater datacentres have been a dependable, sensible and energy-efficient different to working conventional land-based services.
Nonetheless, in an interview with Datacenter Dynamics in June 2024, Microsoft confirmed that it has no plans to take its underwater datacentre experiments any additional, however that it does intend to use its learnings from the expertise to different use circumstances.
