Simon Naylor, SVP APAC, Oper8 Global Group

We’ve got just five years – by 2030 – to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ensure the well-being and prosperity of both people and the planet.

In light of the SDGs, there’s a real sense of urgency with a recent UN announcement putting our data centre industry on notice. The UN has highlighted the growing environmental impact of data centres and servers, and that the sector’s rapid expansion is “largely unregulated and contributes to increased greenhouse gas emissions, accelerating climate change and water scarcity.”

In our post, ‘Don’t be late to AI’s gold rush’, we wrote about estimates that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030, with AI systems to account for nearly half of data centre power consumption by the end of this year.

However, increases in water consumption are potentially even more alarming. The World Economic Forum estimates that a 1MW data centre can consume up to 25.5 million litres of water each year only for cooling, comparable to the daily water use of around 300,000 people. It’s the local impact of water usage that is most alarming.  Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE.cloud) recently admitted that “water scarcity is rapidly becoming a pressing challenge”. AWS is committed to being water positive before 2030, but its three proposed new datacentres in Spain’s Aragorn region will use an estimated 755,720 cubic metres of water a year, enough to irrigate 233 hectares of corn, one of the region’s main crops.

With Knight Frank predicting global data centre capacity to increase by 46% over the next two years, adding approximately 20,828MW, we need to act now to reduce how much water we use for cooling.

The good news is that UN Environment Programme (UNEP) gives us clear goals on what we need to achieve. The UNEP’s recently released Sustainable Procurement Guidelines for Data Centres and Servers, lists five KPIs for scoring in data centre tenders: energy management inside the data centre (PUE), cooling efficiency (CER), water consumption (WUE), the renewable energy factor (REF) and the utilization ratio of the IT equipment itself (ITEUsv).

For WUE, the UNEP has set a goal for data centres to achieve minimum requirement of ≤ 0.2 L/kWh by 2031. Also, UNEP expects new data centres operating at full capacity in cool climates to be designed to a PUE of ≤ 1.1, and ≤ 1.3 in warm climates.

At Oper8 Global Group, we are addressing sustainability directly by deploying alternative energy solutions and energy management technologies. In cool climates, a good technique to improve PUE is to increase the energy efficiency of AC systems is “free cooling”: using outside air – either directly or indirectly – when it is at temperatures lower than the ambient temperature in the data centre. This offers the obvious advantage of reduced energy consumption, since no mechanical cooling is used.

We are also minimising water usage with innovative cooling systems using CO2 as an alternative, as well as direct-to-chip liquid cooling. We are designing prefabricated data centres that can be built with modular and reusable components more efficiently and with minimal waste and shipped to site. We are also evaluating our own internal use of green technologies within the data centre to further enhance sustainability.

There’s only so much we can do to improve sustainability at the data centre infrastructure layer. Ultimately, we need to consider the complete supply chain, from the manufacturing processes for hardware including servers, semiconductors and chips, more energy efficient networking protocols and AI algorithms and models, and a greater use of renewables throughout the industry.