Off a quiet street in Seattle's dingy industrial district, 11 miles from the rolling lawns of Microsoft's Redmond campus, the ne-glected-looking warehouse hardly stands out. But inside, you'll find a small server farm, with 20 racks of machines running off natural-gas-powered fuel cells instead of standard electrical outlets. The eventual goal ofthistestis to cut data center electricity use in half while producing only reusable water, heat and a modest amount of carbon dioxide as waste-one of several energy moon shots that Microsoft will be rolling out over the next two decades, at a cost of hundreds of millions. "It's much more of an existential priority for us, to be at the vanguard and forefront of energy efficiency," says Satya Nadella, Microsoft's chief executive. While altruistic, it's not altruism: Microsoft's recent formidable growth centers on its $23 billion cloud business, particularly its Azure cloud computing unit. The big constraint to Azure's growth, Nadella says, lies in the acres of electricity-guzzling server farms it requires.
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