As Microsoft continues to introduce more resource-supporting AI features and services it’s having to contend with its previous carbon-neutral deadline of 2030, and to do it’s looking into wooden datacenters as a creative solution to address both goals.
Microsoft just announced that it’s experimenting in a northern Virginia suburb with a datacenter constructed of ultra lightweight wood to curb the use of traditional steel and concrete material that tend to create significant carbon emissions during their construction.
The practice of leveraging laminated timber has been in effect in Europe for some time, but is now catching on in the U.S.
While the idea of an all-wooden datacenter may invoke the image of the Three Little Piggies story and bring up some engineering questions, the reality is that Microsoft utilized a hybrid construction model that consisted of some steel, concrete and fire-resistant prefabricated laminated timber to build this new test datacenter.
The hybrid build of the new datacenter in Virginia is supposed to “reduce the embodied carbon footprint of two new datacenters by 35 percent compared to conventional steel construction, and 65 percent compared to typical precast concrete,” according to Microsoft.
The impetus for Microsoft’s new hybrid datacenter is twofold but both goals are centered around relatively aggressive deadlines. Four years ago, Microsoft proposed a 2030 deadline in which the company could call itself carbon neutral while also offering a 2050 deadline when the company would “remove from the atmosphere the equivalent of all the carbon the company has emitted since it was founded in 1975.”
For context, Microsoft is six years away from its carbon neutral deadline and the company recently reported that it has achieved 6.3 percent of its goal. Unfortunately, Microsoft may not have envisioned how introducing AI to consumers would affect their carbon neutral goal and has had to report that the company’s indirect emissions have increased by 30.9 percent over the past four years.
To construct more datacenters to house the servers necessary to run their large language models powering AI efforts like Copilot, Microsoft’s had to increase its land extraction, processing, manufacturing, and material transport, which have all contributed to that 30.9 percent increase in indirect emissions.
Figuratively behind the eightball in its efforts to meet its two ambitious earth-saving goals, Microsoft has prioritized its decarbonization efforts and is labeling all things associated with bringing down its emissions numbers as an “all-hands-on-deck-task”, according to the company’s datacenter engineering team lead Jim Hanna. Microsoft is getting as granular as revising its high-volume partner contracts to only use 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030, investing in low-carbon building material that includes carbon dioxide trapping concrete, and leveraging hydrogen-powered steel production.
In rising-tide-lifts-all-boats kind of way, Microsoft also initiated its Climate Innovation Fund where the company invest $1B to help other companies and venture funds accelerate their own carbon emissions reduction efforts. Four years in and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund has committed $761 million to a number of scalable technologies that will help supercharge awareness and efforts towards carbon emission reduction adoption by or before 2030.
Sweden’s Stegra (formerly H2 Green Steel) is among the companies Microsoft has seen fit to involve in its Climate Innovation Fund as it builds the world’s first large-scale green plant that can account for up to a whopping 95 percent carbon emissions reduction when compared to more traditional steel construction.
Boston Metal represents another Microsoft investment that produces renewable electricity through a unique process of generating oxygen rather than carbon dioxide while crafting steel.
Most of Microsoft carbon neutral efforts are also being weighed against their financial footprint and the company is constantly running cost-benefit analysis when planning its next move.
“We’re constantly trying to validate the suitability of these novel materials for use in a datacenter environment,” says Swanson. “We want to make sure that they’re going to perform, they’re going to be safe, they’re going to be resilient, and provide all the features that we’ve grown accustomed to all these hundreds of years that we’ve been using those other materials.”
David Swanson, Microsoft datacenter design, structural engineer
