Building data centers for a more sustainable tomorrow

Powering data centers requires up to 1.5% of our global electricity usage. The year 2020 marked a turning point for the data center industry to take proactive action on sustainability, and by 2023, 451 Research predicts that data center sustainability will become a competitive differentiator.

Sustainability is important not just for the planet but also for business. NTT DATA is of the largest global data center providers, and we feel a real sense of urgency to take our impact seriously.

We've signed up to a number of goals and initiatives to ensure driving necessary change is at the top of our agenda. The highest-profile of these has been becoming a Business Avenger for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities. This makes our commitment clear, as we proactively and urgently look for ways to reduce our environmental impact.

For more than 20 years, our global data center teams have been a driving force of sustainable change, collaborating and exploring advances across energy supply and consumption and data center building design. Around the world, these teams take measures to develop innovative solutions and have options for renewable energy sources that will enable more sustainable practices across our own and client-operated sites.

There’s especially potential to improve IT load efficiencies within a data center and ensure equipment is working smarter, not harder, fitted with the latest technology to perform more efficiently per wattage.

New data centers designed with sustainability in mind

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is a measure of the power efficiency of a data center, and our new data centers are designed to meet the lowest PUE possible as well as industry best practice across our locations.

For example, our London Data Center has a central cooling system engineered to not use refrigerants that contribute to dangerous greenhouse gases. These components have significant global warming potential, so leaving them out of our cooling systems creates a more sustainable environment for our clients and their customers. This delivers a designed PUE of 1.2.

All power to our London data centers is from 100% renewable energy sources, including onshore and offshore wind sites.

In the US, we also partner with local utility providers to offer renewable energy options at all of our US data center campuses. For example, our three data centers in Sacramento, California, are 100% powered by green energy.

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Overcoming the challenges of operating in a tropical climate and requiring critical cooling, our data center in Singapore was the first facility to exceed its design PUE goal and lead the industry in-country with the lowest rating of 1.5, where the average data center is 2.07.

In Malaysia, the team also had to consider the region’s geographical nuances and design facilities on high ground, away from natural-disaster risk areas, beyond implementing sustainable practices. Double-layer-capacity walls and roofs and an efficient cooling system to manage thermal levels and humidity are critical.

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A positive impact that extends beyond the bottom line

Sustainable development is central to our core purpose of enabling a connected future. More than ever, the world needs brave solutions, both in data centers and elsewhere, to reduce the environmental impact of business operations and increase the use of renewables and innovative technology that improve sustainability.