What is a data center?

• A Data Center is a room or building purpose built for housing computing equipment.
• Data centers can range in size (Edge, Enterprise, Colocation, Hyperscale)
• Data centers power everything you do on the internet. From Social Media to Banking to Chatting with your friends.
• One of the first “Data Centers” before the name was coined is Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1945 for ENIAC
• These buildings provide adequate power, cooling, security, and redundancy that standard office buildings cannot provide.

Data Center Classification

Classification	Typical Size	Power Draw	Water Use (approx. gallons/day)	Land Footprint	Approximate Quantity	Example Usage
Edge	100–1,000 sq ft	5–50 kW	~0 (sealed/closed-loop, no cooling water)	Fits in a closet or cabinet	Tens of thousands globally	Starbucks app orders, Netflix video caching
Enterprise	5,000–50,000 sq ft	500 kW–5 MW	~1,000–5,000 gal/day (DX/chilled water)	~1–5 acres	~2–3 million globally	Local data and applications for organizations and businesses
Colocation	50,000–500,000 sq ft	5–75 MW	~10,000–150,000 gal/day (evaporative cooling)	5–50 acres	~5,000–8,000 facilities globally	Computing infrastructure for multiple businesses and organizations to share
Hyperscale	500,000+ sq ft	75 MW–1+ GW	~300,000–5,000,000+ gal/day (evaporative; some sites report 1M+ gal/day at peak)	100+ acres, multi-building	~1,100 facilities globally	Google Drive / One Drive, Data Processing for research, Netflix video encoding, LLM Training

Those resource numbers seem like a lot… but compared to what?

Resource	Global Data Center Usage	Global Industrial Usage	DC Percentage	Industrial Percentage	Total Global Usage of Resource
Water (per year)	~150–280 billion gallons	0.123 quadrillion gallons	~0.02–0.03%	~21%	1.58 quadrillion
Power (per year)	~460 TWh	~11,850 TWh	~1.6%	~42%	~28,200 TWh

• This information is not to trivialize the need for sustainable cooling and power technologies, but rather to set reasonable scale in the conversation regarding their footprint.
• Another scale to compare: The Great Lakes are approximately 5 Quadrillion gallons of water.
• Water is renewable, but the source is important.

Why So Many Data Centers, Why Now?

• Businesses and organizations are moving to Colocation Data Centers as Office Real Estate needs are changing post pandemic.
• Colocation Data Centers are built to be modular so their electrical and cooling infrastructure can be updated and upgraded more easily than standard enterprise data centers.
• Higher-density computing generates more heat per rack, requiring liquid cooling and power delivery that older buildings weren’t designed for.
• Regulatory or Proximity needs of businesses / medical organizations / universities demand infrastructure be accessible and auditable.

Instead of a BAN on data centers… what CAN we do?

• Work with local and state government to craft smarter regulations that make sure data center build outs utilize tech that works WITH your resource constrictions.
  • Purple pipe (reclaimed / non potable) sources
  • Renewable energy requirements for updating the grid.
  • Limits on Gas Turbine / Diesel Generators to emergency use only
  • Treating colocations as a public utilty
  • Transparency on what TYPES of businesses live in data centers (provides security for orgs, but gives information to the public)
  • Auditable resource use

What organizations can I check out / contribute to for sustainability progress?

Organization	Focus	Link
MLCommons	Industry benchmarks for ML performance and efficiency	mlcommons.org
CodeCarbon	Open-source tool to track the carbon emissions of your code/compute	codecarbon.io
GreenDiSC Framework	Framework for greener digital science / research computing	software.ac.uk/greendisc
EEHPCWG (Energy Efficient HPC Working Group)	Cross-industry group focused on HPC energy efficiency	eehpcwg.lbl.gov/home
The Green Grid	Nonprofit that created PUE and WUE — the industry-standard metrics for data center energy/water efficiency	thegreengrid.org
Uptime Institute	Independent certifications and standards for data center reliability/sustainability; publishes widely-cited annual survey data	uptimeinstitute.com
EESI (Environmental and Energy Study Institute)	DC-based nonpartisan policy institute; publishes accessible explainers on data center energy/water impacts	eesi.org
Green Software Foundation	Nonprofit (under the Linux Foundation) building open standards like SCI for measuring software/AI carbon emissions	greensoftware.foundation
Green Web Foundation	Nonprofit tracking which parts of the internet run on renewable vs. fossil energy; runs the public Green Web dataset/checker	thegreenwebfoundation.org
SDIA (Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance)	Alliance pushing circularity, heat reuse, and sustainability standards specifically for data center infrastructure	sdialliance.org
Software Sustainability Institute	UK-based org supporting sustainable research software practices; home of the GreenDiSC framework above	software.ac.uk