I wonder if this is less about the environmental impact (which can be greenwashed as necessary), and more about the power consumption of individual data centres.
Well datacenters ARE rated by their power usage. And then there is a PUE ratio which indicates how much power is to be used by feeding the equipment vs overall usage for supporting equipment (cooling).
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...
Modern datacenters use local power generation that means lots of bad pollution worse than most factories. There is really bad sound pollution from many of them. They are enormous and create barriers where people should be able to move around.
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...