In 2025, data center sustainability was increasingly about whether fast-growing digital infrastructure could secure electricity, water, land and local acceptance—not just how efficiently a building used energy. A December 19 retrospective by Alyse Burnside for Data Center Knowledge selected ten stories that illustrate those pressures and the responses being explored. They are an editorial selection, not a ranked list or an exhaustive account of the year.
1. Water usage effectiveness put water measurement in focus
As cooling needs rise, operators and communities need to know how much water a facility uses and what that use means in its location. Water usage effectiveness (WUE) is one way to assess a facility’s water intensity. It can help make water use visible, but it cannot by itself answer whether a site’s demand is sustainable.
Columbia University’s 2025 ICEF roadmap cautions that WUE does not show water used off-site to generate electricity or whether a facility sits in a water-stressed area. Direct cooling water is only part of the picture: electricity generation and the production of equipment and materials also contribute to data centers’ water footprints. A useful assessment therefore needs facility water data, local water conditions and wider supply-chain and energy impacts.
Measurement remains uneven. In Uptime Institute’s 2025 worldwide survey, 47% of surveyed organizations collected water-consumption data. Energy use and power usage effectiveness (PUE) were the most commonly tracked metrics; fewer than half of respondents tracked other key sustainability measures. A WUE figure should be read alongside those reporting gaps, not as a complete environmental score.
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2. AI cooling made water availability a siting issue
AI-related growth increases the importance of cooling alongside electricity supply. Cooling choices can shift the balance between energy use and water use, so a design that performs well on one measure may create a different burden on another. Site selection and operations therefore need to account for local water availability as well as power capacity.
The geographic context matters. Columbia University’s 2025 ICEF roadmap reports that two-thirds of U.S. data centers built or in development since 2022 are in areas with high water stress. That finding is specific to the roadmap’s U.S. scope; it should not be treated as a global siting statistic. The same roadmap compares overall global data-center water consumption with agriculture, estimating it at less than 0.008% of the water consumed by agriculture. That global comparison does not make local constraints immaterial: a relatively small share of global use can still matter in a water-scarce community.
3. Saudi Arabia linked AI infrastructure to national energy strategy
The retrospective describes a multi-billion-dollar Saudi initiative connecting digital infrastructure investment with the country’s energy strategy. The significance for sustainability is the link between AI expansion and the energy system expected to support it: infrastructure plans and national energy choices cannot be considered separately.
The retrospective does not establish project-level details such as capacity, cost breakdown, delivery status or environmental performance. The initiative should therefore be understood as a reported strategic direction, not evidence that a particular amount of low-carbon capacity is already operating or that its emissions outcomes have been verified.
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4. APAC expansion sharpened questions about power and land
Rapid data-center growth across Asia-Pacific (APAC) raises questions beyond the number of facilities being built. The sustainability consequences depend in part on how electricity is generated, whether new demand is served by carbon-intensive grids, and how projects use land. Expansion alone does not establish whether a region’s infrastructure is becoming cleaner or more resource-efficient.
For a proposal or facility, the relevant comparison is local: electricity demand and grid emissions, the source and timing of renewable power, land use, water conditions and the effects on nearby communities. Broad regional growth figures cannot substitute for those project-level boundaries.
5. Community concern became part of sustainability planning
Local scrutiny of data-center proposals can focus on noise, water use, electricity demand and other environmental effects. These concerns are not separate from sustainability: they shape whether a project can be planned and operated with community acceptance.
Engagement is most useful when it addresses a proposal’s specific impacts and assumptions rather than relying on general assurances. Planning discussions can make the expected resource demands, cooling approach, site constraints and mitigation measures legible to residents and local decision-makers. The retrospective identifies community concern as a 2025 theme but does not provide evidence to quantify impacts across individual projects.
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6. Policy affected project planning and timelines
Government decisions on emissions reporting, water rights, land use and related issues can influence where facilities are proposed and how quickly they can proceed. For developers and operators, policy is part of the sustainability landscape because it determines what must be measured, permitted and disclosed.
The European Commission’s current energy-performance framework provides a later point of reference, not proof of a 2025 event. Its Directorate-General for Energy page, accessed September 30, 2026, describes reporting on data-center energy and water performance and broader system-level aims. That current framework should be distinguished from the 2025 developments covered in the retrospective; rules, consultations and proposals may change over time.
7. A proposed California design connected facility systems with community planning
The retrospective points to an Arcadis and Terra Ventures project in San Jose as an example involving energy systems, cooling and community-aligned planning. Its relevance is the effort to consider a facility’s infrastructure and its relationship with its surroundings together, rather than treating building efficiency as the only design question.
The article presents an artist’s impression. It does not establish that the facility is operating or provide verified performance results, so the project is best read as a design example—not proof of delivered energy, water or community outcomes.
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8. Small modular reactors remained a longer-term possibility
The retrospective frames small modular reactors (SMRs) as a potential longer-term source of low-carbon baseload electricity for data centers. The appeal is the possibility of dependable power with lower operational carbon emissions than fossil generation, but the article notes that commercial deployments remain several years away.
That timing matters: a prospective energy source cannot be counted as current supply. Any assessment of a data center’s present emissions needs to reflect the electricity actually available to it, while treating future nuclear capacity as contingent on deployment rather than an assured near-term solution.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.9. Operating strategies ranged from renewables to circular procurement
The retrospective groups several practical approaches under operations: renewable power, storage, cooling innovations, waste reduction and circular procurement. These measures address different parts of a facility’s footprint. Renewable procurement and storage concern electricity sourcing and timing; cooling choices affect the energy-water balance; waste reduction and circular purchasing address materials and equipment.
Claims about clean power need a clear accounting boundary: where the electricity is generated, when it is available relative to demand, and what emissions accounting method is being used. A renewable-energy claim without those details can conceal differences between annual procurement and power supply at the time and place a facility consumes electricity.
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Flexibility can also connect a facility to the wider grid. The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy states that “Sustainable, flexible and well-designed data centres that can adjust their electricity use to the grids conditions, can help lower the overall cost of the electricity system, improve grid stability, and integrate more renewable energy.” This is institutional wording from a page accessed September 30, 2026, not a quotation from an individual or evidence that every data center can provide those benefits.
10. Colocation raised the possibility of shared efficiency
Colocation can let multiple organizations use shared facilities and infrastructure rather than build separate data centers. The retrospective presents that shared model as a possible route to efficiency and scale, with the potential to reduce emissions intensity in some cases.
That potential is not a universal measured result. Whether a shared facility performs better depends on its energy supply, cooling, utilization and the boundaries used for comparison. A meaningful comparison should consider total electricity use and grid emissions, water use and local scarcity, direct operations and embodied impacts, renewable-energy accounting, flexibility or heat reuse, and the completeness of reported metrics.
What the 2025 trends mean for evaluating a facility
The forecasts underline the scale of the electricity challenge, but they are projections rather than measured outcomes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2025 report estimates U.S. data-center electricity use at 649 TWh in 2030 in its reference case; its scenarios span 9.5% to 15.3% of total U.S. electricity use that year. The report’s bottom-up model uses planned IT-equipment shipments, device energy-use models, cooling simulations and information about facility types and locations. These figures are U.S. estimates for 2030, not a global forecast or a record of electricity already consumed.
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- Electricity and emissions: demand, grid emissions, renewable sourcing and the timing and geography of the accounting.
- Water: direct consumption, local water stress, and water associated with electricity and equipment.
- Cooling: the energy-water trade-off of the chosen system.
- Materials and operations: waste, procurement, flexibility and potential heat reuse.
- Place and accountability: land use, community impacts, policy requirements and the completeness of reporting.
PUE or WUE alone cannot capture those dimensions. The 2025 trends point instead to a broader test: whether a facility’s resource use, energy sourcing and local impacts are understood together, and whether its claims match the evidence available for its location and operating status.
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