- Microsoft promises to replenish water and pay for energy consumed by its new data centers
- Upcoming data centers will be ‘Community-First’, it promises
- Backlash to environmentally damaging data centers has delayed projects
Microsoft has announced its new initiative to build ‘Community-First AI Infrastructure’, which the company claims is a ‘commitment to do this work differently than some others and to do it responsibly’.
Within this, the tech giant promises to cover the financial cost of energy consumed by the data centers, a burden that has so far fallen onto the consumer – with current estimates calculating that AI infrastructure will see energy demand surge to almost 300% by 2035.
This commitment from Microsoft comes after President Trump asked tech companies to ‘pay their own way’ for their data centers, where he singled out Microsoft for leading the charge amongst tech firms and taking responsibility for their own infrastructure.
Differently than ‘some others’
“This commits us to the concrete steps needed to be a good neighbor in the communities where we build, own, and operate our datacenters,” Microsoft added. “It reflects our sense of civic responsibility as well as a broad and long-term view of what it will take to run a successful AI infrastructure business. In short, we will set a high bar.”
This commitment comes in five forms; paying utility rates to ensure energy prices don’t rise, replenishing more water than the data center uses, creating jobs for residents, paying taxes to invest in local infrastructure, and investing in local AI training and non-profits.
Data centers have been notoriously accused of creating serious and substantial concerns for water supplies (especially in areas that commonly battle with drought issues and water scarcity) – with some local homeowners reporting having lost access to clean drinking water.
Although these data centers may seem reminiscent of large factories or manufacturing plants that carry similar environmental concerns, it’s important to note that these data centers create very few jobs once built, only needing a small amount of technicians to service the center.
It’s unsurprising to see these goodwill commitments from tech companies – not because they care about the communities they ‘serve’, but because communities are pushing back against the damaging effects of such huge, energy and water consuming infrastructure built to support a technology that most consumers ‘don’t care about’.
In fact, reports have claimed around $64 billion in US data center projects have been delayed or blocked by local bipartisan opposition. Microsoft is already rumored to have cancelled several data center projects worth billions of dollars, so this shift towards a responsible data center model is not altogether unsurprising.
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