Environmental Sustainability Research
Microsoft Corporate Environmental Sustainability
Driving a more sustainable world through mission-driven scientific research and applied technology
Projects
This project develops techniques that enable AI to use computing infrastructure more efficiently. The goals are to maintain predictive accuracy while reducing carbon emissions, whether embodied in manufactured hardware, or produced from electricity usage when green energy is not available.
Power Capping and Oversubscription is a collaboration between MSR, Azure Compute, CO+I, and AHSI to harvest stranded datacenter resources via smart performance-aware power capping and oversubscription.
We are actively pursuing a sustainable form of cloud computing, Green Cloud Computing, to reduce the energy consumption and cut down carbon emission accordingly.
The Zissou project is exploring immersion cooling in large-scale cloud platforms. Our main motivation is that chip power has been steadily increasing since the end of Dennard scaling.
Transitioned | By exploring new biological and chemical circularity pathways, Project Zerix aims to achieve net-zero embodied carbon and net-zero waste in our datacenters and beyond — eliminating environmental impacts that pose threats to the health of our people, ecosystems,…
Transitioned | Project Natick seeks to understand the benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea datacenters worldwide — we designed, built, and deployed our own prototype subsea datacenter in the ocean, all in about a year.
Transitioned | This project enables molecular-level data storage into DNA molecules by leveraging biotechnology advances in synthesizing, manipulating and sequencing DNA to develop archival storage. Microsoft and University of Washington researchers are collaborating to use DNA as a high density,…
Project Silica is developing the first-ever storage technology designed and built from the media up, for the cloud. We are leveraging recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics to store data in quartz glass by using femtosecond lasers, and building a…
Building a more environmentally sustainable future “We have a growing team of sustainability scientists working with researchers, businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations around the world to help Microsoft, its customers and partners, and the world to build a more environmentally sustainable future.” The Sustainability Science Team, part of our…