Top 10 Data Center Sustainability Stories Of 2024
DataCenter Knowledge, Wednesday, December 18th, 2024
We unpack our top data center sustainability stories of the year, which covered some of the industry's biggest green trends, innovations and challenges.
In some ways, the sustainability trends that shaped the data center industry in 2024 were unsurprising. Data center energy consumption - and, by extension, carbon emissions - increased, due in large part to greater deployment of AI workloads. Concerns about data center sustainability helped fuel protests against the industry. Environmentalist groups called for greater transparency around data center energy use.
But in other ways, sustainability trends over the past year were less predictable. They involved innovative efforts to reduce data center energy waste by, for example, heating Olympic swimming pools and deploying algae (yes, you read that right) to capture excess heat. It remains to be seen, however, whether efforts like these will become staples of data center sustainability and conservation efforts, or whether they're just innovative proof-of-concepts that will not end gaining widespread adoption.