"In short, we are striving to bring Henry Ford's Model T factory to the data center," Manos said. "In our design process, we questioned everything. You may notice there is no roof and some might be uncomfortable with this. We explored the need of one and throughout our research we got some surprising (positive) results that showed one wasn't needed."

Microsoft says all the pieces needed to construct the data center would be built off-site and assembled once they arrived at the data-center location, much the way planes, cars and computers are built today. The company says the process would mean to erect a new data center.  

And Microsoft expects efficiencies in power usage that blow away even the best-rated facilities today based on power usage effectiveness (PUE), a metric developed by The Green Grid and used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center.

"A key driver is our goal to achieve an average PUE at or below 1.125 by 2012 across our data centers," Manos said on his blog.

Achieving such a low PUE average would be a breakthrough given that the typical data center has an average PUE of 2.5, according to the Uptime Institute. The Institute says that a best-case scenario today could produce a 1.6 PUE average if the data center is using the most efficient equipment and best practices.