Building the future: How datacenters are innovating with sustainability in mind
By Chris Welsch | 22 October 2025
At a primary school in Antwerp, Belgium, immigrant children rely on AI apps to keep up with their Dutch-speaking peers in class and to learn the language more quickly. In Exeter, U.K., government meteorologists at the Met Office make their life-saving forecasts on a supercomputer with AI features in Azure. In Italy, government researchers are using the capacity of the cloud to crack the genetic code of durum wheat to find ways to make it more resilient to climate change.
Beyond cutting-edge AI applications and supercomputing, much of our everyday digital life – from AI-powered searches and emails to photos and stored files – relies on the cloud. And what makes both AI and cloud computing possible are datacenters. Microsoft has continually expanded its cloud capacity for customers. From 2023 to 2027 alone, Microsoft will have expanded its cloud capacity in Europe by 40%. It will have operations in more than 200 datacenters across Europe by the end of 2026.
To meet growing demand responsibly, Microsoft set ambitious goals to reduce environmental impact and prioritize sustainability. The company aims to be carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030. To achieve this, Microsoft is building its new datacenters with a variety of innovative approaches and retrofitting and reimagining older ones. Here are some of the ways that is happening:
Putting biodiversity and landscape at the forefront of design
In Middenmeer, just north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Microsoft partnered with the community to find ways to better integrate an existing datacenter into the Noord-Holland landscape. Working closely with local landscape architects, the team planted 150 native trees and added 2,300 square meters of shrubs, grasses and other plants to create a campus that blends more harmoniously with its surroundings.
Looking ahead, six new datacenters planned nearby are being designed with the principles of biomimicry at the forefront – with efforts to blend the buildings into the landscape while enhancing local biodiversity and reducing environmental impact. Florien ten Hove, Microsoft community affairs manager for datacenters in the Netherlands, explained that landscaping and biodiversity were once afterthoughts. Today, they are the foundation for the company’s plans. She said for community members, landscaping and light pollution are the most important concerns “by far.” “Now we turned it around, and the landscaping is the baseline for the design,” she said. “It’s a totally different approach, all based on biomimicry.”
Kaitlin Chuzi, director of biomimicry for Microsoft’s datacenters globally, says that the biomimicry program in the Netherlands is more than cosmetic. “We expect the native plants we chose will mirror a healthy, resilient ecosystem and support biodiversity, improve storm water control and prevent erosion while reflecting the natural beauty of Noord-Holland,” she says.
Saving and restoring a precious resource: Water
After more than three years of severe drought, Spain has a heightened sensitivity to the essential nature of water. As part of its efforts to be water positive by 2030, Microsoft is constructing datacenters in Zaragoza that use a closed-loop system for cooling by implementing advanced air and liquid-to-chip cooling technologies. Water is filled once during construction and then continuously recirculated between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat – eliminating the need for more water.
“We are designing, building and operating datacenters that are aligned with the community reality,” said Ana Liesa Sorinas, community affairs manager for Microsoft datacenters in Spain.
But as Sorinas points out, this closed-loop cooling system is just the start; Microsoft is partnering with local organizations on two projects that aim to save water.
In Zaragoza, seven farms began a project in March 2025 to irrigate crops more effectively and with less waste. In an area of 740 hectares (about 1,800 acres), farmers are deploying sensors and using AI to deliver water precisely when and where it’s needed, with the goal of saving 100,000 cubic meters of water annually by 2027. This pilot also includes training in the technology to empower more farmers in the region with AI tools that save water while maintaining yields.
Another collaboration tackles the loss of up to 25% of drinking water as it travels through Spain’s system of 275,000 kilometers of pipes. The culprit: leaks. Using a smart sphere called Nautilus that travels through the pipes identifying leaks, the project’s goal is to accelerate repairs and save precious water. “We combine our consumption reduction efforts with investment in water reclamation projects to protect the various watersheds,” said Eoin Doherty, vice president of Cloud Operations + Innovation at Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa. “We see this as a way to help restore and protect the water resources where we operate.”
Recycled steel: Upcycling a datacenter
In 2022, Microsoft purchased a defunct radiator factory sitting on 40 acres of land in Newport, Wales, as the site for a datacenter. Framed with steel beams, the old factory posed a challenge: could the new building be constructed, at least in part, by repurposing those steel beams?
John O’Sullivan was hired to be the project manager for the construction of the Newport site, and he embraced the task. O’Sullivan explains that sometimes he’s seen sustainability projects that didn’t have a lot of substance. “But for me, I could actually see that this was tangible,” he said. “I could touch this, I could see it, I could see we could make a difference here.”
Today, the structure is partially complete, and 10% of the steel holding it up comes from the original building – saving about 520 tons of carbon dioxide. The company also found sources of recycled steel, meaning the building used 74% recycled steel overall, with a carbon savings of 4,400 tons.
Beyond steel, the datacenter is also prioritizing landscaping and biodiversity, O’Sullivan says. Trees, scrub habitat and native grasses are being planted to create wildlife corridors between habitats on either side of the property, one of which is a nature reserve that had fallen into disuse; some people had been using it to dump trash.
Councillor Dimitri Batrouni is the leader of Newport City Council; he says that Microsoft helped restore the nature reserve and has been responsive to community concerns about noise, landscaping and environmental impact.
Once an industrial hub with a steel plant that employed about 10,000 people, Newport has shifted its focus to developing its tech economy, with several datacenters as well as semiconductor and microchip operations, Batrouni says. “Out of those embers have emerged the industries of the new world based on data and microchips,” he says. He’s pushing for more training programs because “it’s important to show local people that these jobs are for them as well.”
Completing the circle of use, reuse and recycle
In a world where resources are precious, every element of a datacenter has the potential to be used, reused and recycled, meaning less demand for everything from plastics to rare earth minerals. To advance this vision, Microsoft opened its first Circular Center in Amsterdam in 2020; today there are eight centers worldwide, with several others being built. These hubs are depots to recover and repurpose datacenter components, helping Microsoft move toward its goal of zero waste by 2030. In 2024, the company achieved a significant milestone: a 90.9% reuse and recycling rate of servers and components, exceeding its 2025 target of 90% a year ahead of schedule.
The newest circular center is currently being built in Newport, near the new datacenter under construction there. Like the others, it will recycle and reuse servers and other equipment, in some cases sharing them with local vocational training programs to help educate the next generation of technicians. The Newport circular center, responsible for the recycling of materials from all of Microsoft’s datacenters in the U.K., is expected to process about 500,000 pounds, or about 226,800 kilos, of material annually.
Being a ‘good grid citizen’
Electricity flows like a river through power lines, always at the same wavelength – in Europe, that’s a “sine wave” of 50 hertz. Moreover, production of electricity must match consumption, because unlike a river, the flow of electrons cannot be dammed. The growth of renewable energy sources has complicated this balance: Because wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining, power levels are less predictable and matching consumption and generation is more challenging.
Enter Microsoft. At new datacenters being built in Finland, Sweden and Denmark, the company is linking a system of sophisticated backup batteries (known as GUPS, or Grid-Interactive Uninterruptible Power Supply) to stabilize the local power grids. These systems, which have already been in use in Ireland for several years, help maintain a steady grid frequency even when the weather changes and power flow ebbs and surges. The hardware has already been installed at two datacenters in Denmark and Sweden and is scheduled to go online next year.
The battery system works to “smooth the flow by doing just a tiny bit of correction along the way and keeping the sine wave still looking good,” said Olli Huotari, the senior program manager in charge of the GUPS program in the Nordics. Huotari says that this service aligns with Microsoft’s carbon-negative goal by making renewable energy easier to integrate.
“Of course it has a cost for us,” he says, “and we need to renew the batteries a bit more often, but we see it as a one of those things where we are being a good grid citizen.”
Warming homes and businesses with recycled heat
Imagine if every time you had a video conference or sent an email, you were helping heat your home – and others in the neighborhood. For communities in Finland and Denmark, that’s becoming reality thanks to waste heat recovery programs that channel heat from datacenters into municipal heating districts.
In the case of Finland, Microsoft partnered with a local energy company called Fortum on a project that will eventually supply heat to 250,000 clients in Espoo, Kirkkonummi and Kauniainen, according to Shannon Wojcik, the Microsoft senior project manager leading the effort. The datacenters involved are included in Microsoft’s commitment to procure enough renewable energy to cover 100% of the company’s energy consumption. “Especially in the Nordics, they use the heat from the datacenters as a really valuable resource that they can use for their heating network,” she says. The system is scheduled to begin operations in 2027.
At the Espoo campus, hot air from cooling systems will be converted into hot water (30 degrees Celsius, or about 86 degrees Fahrenheit). Fortum has built a heat pump plant near the datacenter site to boost the temperature before feeding it into the municipal heating network, where it will deliver hot water to heat homes and businesses. A similar system is being set up in Denmark, in a municipal heating district serving communities near Copenhagen.
Wojcik says that Microsoft envisions more such collaborations and even sharing datacenter heat with other businesses. “I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there, not just with district heating systems,” she says. “Greenhouses is one – if we could put datacenters next to greenhouses or vice versa, they actually need lower-temperature heat, so we wouldn’t need to boost the heat as much.”
