- Microsoft promises to top up water and pay for energy consumed by its new data centers
- Future 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 others and 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 on the consumer – with current estimates calculating that AI infrastructure will see energy demand rise by almost 300% by 2035.
This commitment from Microsoft comes after President Trump asked tech companies to “pay their own way” for their data centers, singling out Microsoft for leading the charge among tech companies and taking responsibility for their own infrastructure.
Different from ‘some others’
“This commits us to the concrete steps necessary to be a good neighbor in the communities where we build, own and operate our data centers,” Microsoft added. “It reflects our sense of social responsibility as well as a broad and long-term view of what it takes to run a successful AI infrastructure company. In short, we want to set a high bar.”
This commitment comes in five forms; pay utility rates to ensure energy prices don’t rise, refill more water than the data center uses, create jobs for residents, pay taxes to invest in local infrastructure, and invest in local AI training and non-profits.
Data centers have notoriously been accused of creating serious and significant concerns for water supplies (especially in areas that often struggle with drought issues and water scarcity) – with some local homeowners reporting having lost access to clean drinking water.
While these data centers may seem reminiscent of large factories or manufacturing facilities with similar environmental concerns, it is important to note that these data centers create very few jobs once built and only require a small amount of technicians to service the center.
It’s not surprising 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 harmful effects of such a huge, energy- and water-consuming infrastructure built to support a technology that most consumers ‘don’t care about’.
In fact, reports have claimed that about $64 billion in US data center projects have been delayed or blocked by local bipartisan opposition. Microsoft is already rumored to have canceled several data center projects worth billions of dollars, so this shift towards a responsible data center model is not entirely surprising.
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