A growing reliance on data centers

This shift towards an increasingly digitized world has new and growing requirements of its own: data centers have become the foundation upon which modern life is built. Every email, every streamed movie, every internet search; all rely on data centers. The AI boom is dramatically accelerating demand, and supply is struggling to keep pace.

Yet, data center construction is not sustainable in its current form. Data centers’ power demand, already an eyewatering 2% share of global energy consumption, is projected to more than double by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute.¹

The huge amount of embodied carbon generated by data centers across their lifecycle poses a major challenge that so far remains unsolved as the average data center generates up to 4500 mtCO2e per MW (estimated), which is equivalent to burning up to 495,000 gallons of gas for every MW. We estimate that the embodied carbon associated with construction of new data centers could reach 88 million metric tons of CO2e annually by 2030, while the heat wasted from existing centers contains the potential to meet the needs of over 13 million homes.²

This poses considerable unanswered questions around capacity, power and most notably, sustainability. Could adaptive reuse be part of a solution to solving some of the toughest challenges in data center construction and management?

1 EPRI Study: Data Centers Could Consume up to 9% of U.S. Electricity Generation by 2030

2 Data centres - the backbone of the internet

Average data center generates up to

mtCO2e per MW

Equivalent to burning up to

gallons of gas for every MW