The Data Center Boom Meets Sustainability: Hard Tradeoffs, Real Solutions

Data centers are entering an unprecedented era of expansion across economic, technological, and energy dimensions. By 2030, global investment needs are expected to reach 6.7 trillion dollars to support rapidly accelerating computing demand, with total capacity requirements projected to nearly triple, driven largely by artificial intelligence workloads. Analysts forecast an infrastructure supercycle requiring up to 3 trillion dollars in new development and nearly 100 gigawatts of additional global capacity between 2026 and 2030. At the same time, worldwide data center electricity consumption is projected to more than double from 2024 levels to roughly 945 terawatt hours by 2030, approaching the current annual electricity use of Japan. These trends place substantial pressure on power and water systems, intensify the need for high-density cooling and grid-interactive strategies, and elevate the importance of reducing operational performance impacts. As a result, owners and developers face increasingly complex design, infrastructure, and siting tradeoffs in a rapidly evolving landscape. This session explores how the industry can invest for impact by navigating these challenges while prioritizing measurable efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. This session brings together practitioners across mission-critical engineering, sustainability, commissioning, and environmental analysis to examine strategies that most effectively improve data center performance and reduce resource intensity. The discussion will focus on technical levers that drive measurable outcomes, including advanced cooling and heat-reuse pathways, power-system optimization, water-use reduction, embodied-carbon considerations in design, and operational verification through robust commissioning. The panel will also address strategy decisions from the owner/operator, permitting and environmental review processes that influence site feasibility, regional constraints, long-term operational risk, and community engagement. Participants will gain clear, actionable guidance on where to target investment for the highest impact across new data center developments, enabling meaningful progress on decarbonization, resilience, equity, and efficiency in one of the world’s fastest-growing and most resource-intensive sectors.