Microsoft’s growing interest in high-temperature superconductor (HTS) technology for data center applications raises a question that the tech industry has mostly avoided: can materials originally engineered for the electric grid solve the enormous cooling and power delivery challenges inside server farms? The answer is not straightforward, but decades of real-world HTS deployments in the U.S. power sector offer hard evidence that zero-resistance cables work outside the lab. What remains unproven is whether the economics and engineering translate cleanly from utility substations to the racks of a hyperscale data center.
Grid-Proven Cables, Not Lab Curiosities
The strongest argument for HTS in data centers is that the technology has already survived the messy realities of commercial power delivery. The Holbrook Substation Superconductor Cable System on Long Island, New York, stands as one of the clearest examples. Developed under the LIPA project, the system was energized, commissioned, and operated over a sustained period, generating a detailed record of refrigeration events and operational lessons. The final technical report archived by the U.S. Department of Energy documents not just peak performance but the kinds of cryogenic hiccups and maintenance realities that any future data center deployment would need to plan for.
This matters because skeptics often frame superconductors as exotic physics experiments. The Holbrook record shows otherwise. The system’s operating history includes real refrigeration failures, recovery procedures, and long-term reliability data. For a company like Microsoft evaluating whether HTS cables could replace conventional copper bus bars inside a facility, this kind of field data is far more useful than any simulation. The question is not whether HTS cables can carry power with zero resistance; it is whether the cryogenic support systems can run reliably enough to justify the added complexity.
Chicago’s Resilience Program as a Design Template
A second line of evidence comes from Chicago, where the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate launched its Resilient Electric Grid program in partnership with AMSC and ComEd. The DHS feasibility study was designed around a specific threat model: storms, cyberattacks, and physical sabotage that could knock out conventional transmission lines. The HTS cables developed under the REG program included built-in fault-current limiting, meaning they could automatically constrain dangerous power surges without external breakers. That dual function, carrying bulk power while also protecting the grid, is exactly the kind of efficiency gain that data center operators chase.
The Chicago project moved well beyond feasibility. ComEd filed FERC Docket No. ER19-1478-000 on March 29, 2019, submitting technical and commercial details for the REG/HTS installation, as documented in a peer-reviewed paper published in Physica C: Superconductivity and its Applications. That filing represents a regulatory milestone: a utility formally presenting superconductor infrastructure to federal energy regulators with concrete engineering specs. For data center planners, the Chicago experience suggests that HTS cables can be designed, permitted, and operated within existing regulatory frameworks, not just in special research corridors.
Why Data Centers Need What the Grid Already Has
The core appeal of HTS for data centers is straightforward. Conventional copper and aluminum conductors generate resistive heat whenever current flows through them. In a facility that already struggles to remove heat from thousands of processors, the wiring itself becomes part of the thermal problem. Superconductors eliminate resistive losses entirely when cooled below their critical temperature, typically using liquid nitrogen. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity has spent decades funding HTS research and development, and its own reporting on real deployments highlights capacity advantages over conventional wire along with resilience and rerouting benefits demonstrated in projects like the Chicago installation.
Here is where I think the current coverage of Microsoft’s interest gets the story slightly wrong. Most reporting frames HTS as a cooling technology. It is more accurate to call it a heat-prevention technology. Traditional data center cooling systems fight the thermal output of both the servers and the electrical infrastructure feeding them. If HTS cables eliminated resistive heating from the power distribution layer, the cooling systems would have less work to do, but the cables themselves still require cryogenic refrigeration. The net energy savings depend entirely on whether the cryogenic overhead is smaller than the resistive losses it replaces. That tradeoff has been measured in grid applications but not yet published for intra-facility data center wiring, which is a significant gap in the public evidence.
The Cryogenic Cost Problem No One Likes to Discuss
Every HTS deployment requires a refrigeration system to keep the cables at operating temperature. The Holbrook Substation report is unusually candid about this: it documents specific refrigeration events, including failures and the procedures used to recover from them. In a utility context, a temporary loss of cooling on one cable segment is manageable because the grid has redundant paths. In a data center, where uptime expectations often exceed 99.99%, any cryogenic failure that forces a cable offline could cascade into service interruptions. Microsoft and other hyperscalers would need to engineer redundant cooling loops for every HTS circuit, adding capital cost and operational complexity.
This is the tension that I think deserves more scrutiny. The physics of HTS are genuinely impressive, and the grid deployments prove the technology works at scale. But data centers operate under different constraints than utilities. A substation can tolerate scheduled maintenance windows; a cloud provider serving millions of users cannot. The economic case for HTS in data centers will ultimately hinge on whether the total cost of ownership, including cryogenic infrastructure, maintenance, and redundancy, comes in below the combined cost of conventional wiring, plus the cooling energy needed to remove its waste heat. No public data from Microsoft or any other cloud operator has yet answered that question with facility-level numbers.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
