E D I T O R ' S Q U E S T I O N
HOW DO YOU SEE THE EVOLUTION OF SUSTAINABILITY PRACTICES IN DATA CENTRES?
he evolution of
T sustainability practices in data centres is no longer a future ambition – it’ s a present-day imperative.
From hyperscalers to colocation providers, operators across the globe are rethinking how to minimise environmental impact while meeting the insatiable demand for data. Energy efficiency, once the headline goal, is now just the starting point.
Modern sustainability strategies encompass everything from circular design principles and water conservation to renewable energy procurement and real-time carbon tracking.
Regulation is tightening, customers are demanding greener supply chains and investors are paying close attention to ESG performance.
As a result, data centres are moving beyond incremental gains to embrace innovations like liquid cooling, AI-powered energy optimisation and modular designs that lower material waste.
The industry is also beginning to see sustainability not as a trade-off, but as a competitive differentiator. Operators who get it right are building not just more responsible infrastructure, but more resilient and future-ready businesses. In this Editor’ s Question, we speak to three industry experts to explore how far the sector has come – and where it’ s heading next.
Sustainability is not new. Efficiency has always been at the core of data centre design and build, and sustainability is intrinsic to efficiency. However, it is evolving alongside the new demands that AI is putting on infrastructure. AI generates significant heat and more power is needed to cool the IT systems it runs on.
This means that power is the defining sustainability challenge. McKinsey estimates that Europe’ s data centre power consumption will jump from 62 TWh to over 150 TWh by 2030. As a result, 200MW-500MW megascale campuses with renewable energy access are emerging, prioritising scale over proximity to yield more efficiency and sustainability.
As well as the use of alternative energy, other sustainable power practices are evolving. Some data centres are introducing smart grid integration with national electricity grids to provide demand response services, helping balance overall energy use and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. There have also been advances in on-site battery storage and energy management strategies to allow data centres to stabilise power consumption and contribute to grid stability.
DAVID WATKINS, SOLUTIONS DIRECTOR AT VIRTUS DATA CENTRES
However, despite AI requiring more power, it is being increasingly employed to make data centres more energy efficient. AI is being used to manage the cooling systems themselves – traditionally one of the most energy-intensive aspects of data centre operation.
Using real-time data and predictive modelling, it can ensure that energy is only used when necessary. AI-powered energy management systems are being deployed to improve efficiency in realtime – autonomously adjusting cooling systems, energy consumption and server workloads. By leveraging historical data and live environmental inputs, AI optimises each decision, helping to achieve minimal resource waste and operational downtime. This allows data centres to significantly enhance energy efficiency.
Cooling technologies are evolving too as conventional air-cooling struggles to cope with the heat generated by new chips such as general processing units( GPUs) and tensor processing units( TPUs). Liquid cooling is emerging as a more sustainable option. It can reduce the amount of energy used by a facility as it takes less electricity to cool a server than air cooling systems.
From immersion cooling to direct-to-chip solutions, advanced cooling methods are now critical to maintaining AI performance without excessive energy consumption. But the focus is also shifting from using cooling technologies to meet energy reduction targets, to the reuse of heat energy. Liquid cooling enables waste heat to be reused to power local district heating systems, swimming pools and support industrial processes, helping to minimise the carbon footprint of data centres.
Sustainability practices in data centres will continue to evolve. There needs to be a balance between reducing environmental impact without compromising operations and reliability, whilst at the same time enabling AI to reach its potential.
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