06/11/2026
Data Center discussion✨-
As an ecological permaculture designer and native plant specialist this is a topic me and fellow Ecological designers and Conservation practitioners have been diving into recently in seminars, research projects, and meetings on projects that either have been implemented already in other countries or should/ will be in the future involving Data centers. This is the biggest talking point in my career field right now and everyone has the same questions.
This discussion has come up with a plethora of people now, and I fully agree that generative AI isn’t beneficial to humanity. But AI specifically isn’t what I’m talking about here as most people tend to lump together. I’m talking about ALL data centers for streaming, social media platforms, hosting websites, email, online banking, enterprise centers, telecommunication centers, government data centers and research and scientific computing centers.
Data centers in the US as they are currently are a hot mess, yes I fully agree. This post isn’t to defend the dumpster fire that they currently are. They consume tons of water, give off loads of heat, are often loud, cause light pollution and take large amounts of power from our grid, and destroy vital habitats among other things.
The biggest thing is that even if AI centers weren’t in the picture, we would still have Data centers. If you use Amazon? Massive data centers. Email? Data centers. Use a cellphone? Data centers. Hospitals? Data centers. Watch YouTube, Netflix, or any other streaming? Data centers. You get my point here. Technology as a whole is still expanding rapidly as is humanity. We will always have these in growing number as more tech becomes mainstream.
While AI data centers are a new and rapidly expanding source of them, they’ve always been there. And they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon much to the dismay of the general public.
The most important problem we have to solve, (and many countries are already doing this in some really unique ways) is to figure out how to make the centers more sustainable. How can we offset carbon emissions? How can we utilize the heat they create? How can we recycle or reduce water used in cooling? How can we make them smaller? How can we preserve the land that is yet to be damaged by them? What rules do we put in place? Could we use them to create more power than we take? Could we utilize the resources it gives off??
I could continue with the novel worth of questions we have had to meticulously go through, but the biggest thing is- we are creating solutions to those questions. The bigger issue is getting US corporations to actually use them, and getting regulations to change to support these.
Our current solutions for freshwater preservation:
-Use air cooling and build them in cold climates
-implement cooling towers to capture and recycle evaporated water
-use water from sewage treatment plants, then purify it further and use for irrigation or other sources
-build them underwater, or underground in old mines
Uses for the waste heat they give off:
- use to warm greenhouses
- pipe heat to homes and city infrastructures
-drying agricultural products
- warm water used in aquaculture like tilapia and algae cultivation before put into cooling
-industrial preheating and washing systems
-absorption cooling
Solutions for reducing the heat and global warming:
-improving computing efficiency (best cooling system is the one you don’t need)
- creating living ecological buffers on rooftops and around the building and use evapotranspiration
-Paint the roof white/ reflective to reflect heat back (this also reduces heat inside the building and would make it so less water and energy is used)
Energy solutions:
-wind and solar microgrids
-hydroelectric
-geothermal
- waste to energy systems (methane digesters, waste incinerators, landfill gas capture etc.)
Light pollution solutions-
-Rules on specific types of lighting
-Amber and red/ warm wavelength lights
-shielded fixtures
-motion sensor lighting instead of 24/7
-zoned lighting.
Sound pollution solutions-
-Acoustic enclosures
-low noise/ high efficiency fans
-liquid cooling fluid
-earth berms, tree lines etc as buffers
-indoor only airflow design
These are only some of the possibilities and options we currently could have available if we fought to get them put into place. There has been a massive amount of research in various countries testing out many of these methods, and many we are finding are working beautifully at reducing the harm these centers cause. anyway I’m done for now- feel free to ask questions or even better yet, add some more ideas or solutions onto here. We are constantly searching for new ideas on how to fix the massive problems these centers are currently causing.
