Top Data Center Sustainability Trends to Watch in 2025

Sustainability has been a hot topic in the data center industry for several years, and that trend will certainly extend into 2025. But what, exactly, will data center operators do in the new year to improve sustainability? Which new technologies or techniques are they likely to adopt? And which novel sustainability challenges might they face?

Here’s a roundup of data center sustainability trends expected to impact the industry in the coming year.

1. Surging Data Center Energy Use

Arguably the most important data center trend to watch in the new year will be just how much additional energy data centers use. A PGIM report from 2024 predicted that total data center energy consumption would double by 2026.

If this is true, it will have profound implications for data center sustainability because doubling data center energy usage likely translates roughly to a doubling of the amount of emissions associated with data centers. Data center operators and utilities companies may be able to leverage low-emissions renewable energy to accommodate some of the surge in demand, but the bulk of it will almost certainly be met by “dirty” energy, at least in the short term.

That said, it’s possible that predictions about major increases in data center energy consumption are off the mark. Over the course of the year, it should become clearer how severe the energy usage surge is – and how many new sustainability challenges it creates for the industry.

Related:Top 10 Data Center Sustainability Stories of 2024

2. Adoption of Public Cloud as a Sustainability Measure

Data released this year by Amazon and IDC showed that on the whole, public clouds are more sustainable than private data centers. This is largely because public clouds benefit from economies of scale that allow them to use energy more efficiently.

Historically, sustainability has not been a major motive for migrating workloads to the public cloud. But now that it’s becoming clearer that public cloud does offer sustainability benefits, expect to see more businesses pivoting toward the public cloud as part of a sustainability strategy.

3. Edge Data Centers as Sustainability Solutions

Another way to improve sustainability is to place data centers in locations with abundant access to renewable energy and water. And while it’s not usually feasible to relocate an entire large-scale data center, data center operators may be able to boost sustainability outcomes by investing in edge data centers.

The reason why is simple: Edge data centers, which are typically small in scale and sometimes designed to be mobile, can easily be deployed in areas that provide sustainability benefits. They can even move around in some cases by, for instance, relocating periodically based on seasonal fluctuations in the availability of wind power.

Related:Behind-the-Meter Energy: Powering Data Centers for a Sustainable Future

Although the bulk of workloads will continue to reside in traditional data centers for the foreseeable future, don’t be surprised if you hear more in 2025 about edge data centers as a step toward improving sustainability.

4. Growing Awareness of Water’s Role in Data Center Sustainability

Another new trend in the data center sustainability conversation in 2025 is likely to involve water. Historically, much of the focus on sustainability in the industry was in reducing energy consumption and the emissions associated with powering data centers. But growing groundwater shortages are increasing the pressure on data center operators to use water more efficiently, too.

This trend is likely to continue into 2025 and beyond as the industry bulbs more and more data centers, and as water resources become increasingly constrained.

5. More Transparent Sustainability Reporting for Data Centers

One of the biggest challenges surrounding data center sustainability is that it can be difficult to determine exactly how sustainable a data center is. Data center operators track and report sustainability efforts in inconsistent ways, and they’re not always especially transparent about their sustainability methods. They may purchase carbon offsets, for example, so that they can report low emissions numbers, rather than actually reducing energy consumption or sourcing more renewable energy.

Related:Data Centers Lead the Charge Toward Net Zero Emissions

But this might change in 2025 as the industry faces growing pressure for transparency in sustainability reporting. The past year witnessed a call for “nutrition labels” where data center operators would report sustainability metrics in a transparent way. That initiative is totally voluntary and there is so far no sign that any major data center company is signing on, but I nonetheless suspect that more data center operators will begin working to make sustainability reporting more transparent in the new year. This is especially true if regulators were to signal interest in transparent sustainability data, which is plausible.

6. Optimizing Servers and Workloads to Improve Sustainability

Much of the data center sustainability conversation focuses on what you might call macro-level measures that improve the sustainability of an entire data center, like investing in more efficient energy systems.

But there are also opportunities for micro-level sustainability optimizations that focus on individual servers or workloads. For example, businesses could choose energy-efficient chips when purchasing hardware or optimize an application’s logic to avoid unnecessary CPU usage (and, by extension, avoid wasting energy).

Practices like these require more effort, and they only work if a data center company has control over the hardware and software inside its facility – which is typically not the case for colocation providers. Nonetheless, as data center operators look for more creative ways to improve sustainability, expect increased focus on individual servers and workloads in addition to systems that span the entire data center.