By Christopher Binder, Halley Sizemore, Adam Wellen and Annie Snyder
More than 300 data center professionals came to Dallas in May for GBI’s Better Buildings: Data Centers Seminar. They represented a cross-section of the industry, including designers, owners, operators, engineers, policymakers, and sustainability experts across the data center ecosystem.
Over two days, attendees addressed some of the industry’s most pressing challenges. Here are the most important things we learned when it comes to sustainability in the data center industry:
1. Community trust is essential
The seminar opened with a short documentary highlighting community concerns as data center development continues at a rapid pace. It placed these issues front and center in conversations throughout the event.
Dr. Noah Goldstein of Google addressed this directly during his keynote presentation: the industry should be doing more to earn community trust, and a lack of engagement and transparency pose real problems for project development.
Panelists throughout the day reaffirmed that community concern shouldn’t be treated as a problem to manage. Rather, it should be treated as a catalyst to improve building performance and reduce localized impacts.
The closing panel, “More Than Megawatts,” moderated by Phil Koblence of Nomad Futurist and NYI, made this concrete. Representatives from Applied Digital, PointOne, PowerHouse Data Centers, Crane, and Loudoun County all pointed toward the same conclusion: community engagement cannot be an afterthought. It needs to be embedded in project development from day one. The industry’s long-term credibility depends on the actions they take now to proactively work with communities and address concerns through meaningful dialogue, design decisions that prioritize sustainability, and putting resources into programs and infrastructure improvements that bring tangible benefits.
The takeaway: community engagement is not a box to be checked. It should be at the forefront of every development decision.
2. The energy crisis is here and it’s forcing the industry to become something it wasn’t designed to be.
Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) is forecasting over 367 GW of power demand in Texas by 2033. The transmission infrastructure investment required to meet that demand is measured in the tens of billions. The gap between what the grid can currently deliver and what the industry needs is growing faster than solutions are emerging.
A panel moderated by Dean Perrine of JSA, featuring WB Engineers + Consultants, ERCOT, Crusoe, and Schneider Electric, made clear that grid operators are not going to solve this problem alone. They need developers who bring innovation to the table and are willing to contribute toward grid stability and demand management.
There was widespread recognition that data center development and energy infrastructure are fundamentally intertwined: the challenges faced by electric utilities are now shared by the customers they hope to serve. Collaboration is essential to address the scale and pace of load growth and the realities of aging grid infrastructure. There are no easy solutions, but panelists and audience members coalesced on questions at the center of this industry-wide discourse: In what timeframe can data center developers work to build nuclear capacity, or deploy other alternative energy sources at scale? How do smaller developers compete in a world where power supply becomes a strategic differentiator? How can state PUCs incentivize development that brings new capacity into the grid and upgrades to existing infrastructure?
The takeaway: the energy question is no longer just an operational cost issue. It’s strategic, existential, and has significant environmental externalities. The companies that figure out integrated energy solutions the earliest will have a meaningful advantage.
3. Sustainable construction doesn’t have to slow you down, but coordination must improve dramatically.
When it comes to building greener data centers our biggest barriers aren’t technical, they are logistical.
A session on alternate delivery strategies, moderated by Brian Stamper of Advantic Building Group and featuring voices from Compass Datacenters, Aligned Data Centers, Mortenson, Corgan, and Holder Construction, discussed how a lack of cross-industry coordination is what truly stalls sustainable development.
Power availability constraints, long equipment lead times, misaligned incentives between utilities and developers, and inconsistent municipal engagement all slow projects down and push developers toward less sustainable shortcuts. A more structured, cross-sector approach that engages key stakeholders through earlier and more consistent dialogue could help bridge those gaps while continuing to support business growth.
When you combine a strained grid and long equipment lead times with misaligned incentives from utilities and unpredictable city approvals, projects stall. Too often, these systemic delays panic teams into taking less sustainable, carbon-intensive shortcuts just to meet deadlines. If we want to build better without sacrificing growth, we need to completely rethink our approach to partnerships. That means breaking down silos and getting utilities, municipalities, policymakers, and industry players in the same room much earlier to align on sustainable goals.
Upstream choices are equally vital, a point driven home during the sustainable materials panel moderated by Miranda Gardiner of the iMasons Climate Accord and featuring Global Electronics Council, Leviton, WoodWorks, and Equinix, added another dimension: the choices made before a shovel hits the ground matter enormously.
Mitigating embodied carbon in structural materials, demanding supply chain transparency, and mapping out a facility’s lifecycle are the new benchmarks for responsible development. To accelerate this progress across the board, the industry must align on clearer environmental standards and shared data.
The takeaway: speed and sustainability are not inherently in conflict. But achieving both requires coordination that the industry hasn’t yet built at scale.
4. Water is a main concern, and data centers need to better inform the public.
Public concern about data center water consumption is growing, and reflects valid fears about data center resource use – especially in water-stressed areas. However, many modern data center facilities have implemented new technologies that mitigate water consumption and their impacts to these resources. The gap between what’s happening on the ground and widespread community and regulator perceptions of data center water consumption represents both a risk and an opportunity.
The water panel, moderated by Matt Grandbois of AirJoule and featuring speakers from HDR, Stream Data Centers, Atmosphere Data Centers, Rowan Digital Infrastructure, and Cumulus, made clear that the industry’s communication problem is nearly as significant as its actual water management challenge. Different cooling strategies yield drastically different water footprints. Closed-loop liquid cooling, for example, can significantly reduce water consumption compared to evaporative cooling systems. Additionally, conflation of water use – the use and return of water to its source – and water consumption – where water is lost through evaporation to the water cycle – can lead to further misunderstandings of a facility’s impact to water resources.
Panelists also emphasized the need for common metrics for data center water reporting, and recognized the limitations of water usage effectiveness (WUE) at accounting for upstream water consumption during energy production. There was strong consensus on the need for greater standardization of industry water metrics and for careful consideration of the “water-energy nexus” (the tradeoffs between more water- and energy-efficient cooling strategies) in facility design.
The takeaway: concerns about data center water consumption are an understandable reaction to the rapid growth of this industry, yet are often disproportionate to actual water impacts. Communication and transparency on water-efficient facility design is paramount to address community and regulator concerns.
5. Adaptive reuse is an underutilized tool. Legacy infrastructure is not a liability if you approach it right.
As the digital infrastructure sector faces an unprecedented climate reckoning, legacy infrastructure must no longer be viewed as an operational liability, but rather as a crucial asset for maximizing existing lifecycle value and avoiding new carbon expenditures. A session on adaptive reuse and legacy data center modernization, moderated by Steve Truebner of Legence and featuring speakers from CMTA, Inc., JLL, CyrusOne, and Keating Resources, surfaced an opportunity that tends to be underweighted in an industry that defaults to ground-up construction.
Eco-friendly restructuring is no longer optional; it’s the foundation of our future. By pioneering adaptive reuse, developers can drastically mitigate the upfront expenditure of embodied carbon, bypassing the massive Scope 3 emissions inherently tied to new concrete and steel production. This carbon-first strategy simultaneously yields profound operational dividends, including compressed deployment timelines, optimized capital efficiency, plus immediate grid capacity that has already been secured, bypassing a major bottleneck for new construction.
The session highlighted the real engineering challenges of upgrading old buildings, but the bigger picture is clear: we need a mindset shift. Reusing and upgrading industrial real estate, rather than tearing down and rebuilding, slashes pollution and keeps assets valuable longer. It proves that going green and staying competitive go hand in hand.
The takeaway: Relying on new construction by default is simply a failure to manage both our carbon footprint and our long-term investments.
6. Certifications and standards are moving from “nice to have” to “need to have”.
Across multiple sessions, third-party certification was discussed not as a marketing exercise but as a practical mechanism for accountability to communities, to investors, to regulators, and to the industry itself. GBI’s Green Globes® and Ascent Building Certification™, which includes specific criteria for data center design and operations, was discussed as a framework and tool for improving sustainability outcomes.
Emphasizing verifiable outcomes is further reinforced through a new Memorandum of Understanding between GBI and the iMasons Climate Accord (iCA), connecting GBI’s whole-building certification framework with iCA’s carbon reporting standards for digital infrastructure. As Miranda Gardiner of iCA and Sumayyah Theron of Avant-garde Sustainable Solutions (GBI’s Board Chair) each noted in remarks tied to the announcement, the goal is end-to-end accountability: sustainability that’s verifiable at the supply chain level, the component level, and the building level simultaneously.
The EPEAT collaboration, highlighted by Holly Elwood of the Global Electronics Council, adds another layer: EPEAT-registered products now count toward points in Green Globes® and Ascent Building Certification™, extending sustainability accountability down into the hardware layer of the facility.
The takeaway: the regulatory and investor environment is moving in a direction where third-party certification of sustainability performance will be expected, not optional. Organizations that have invested in certifications will be glad they did, and those who have not will expose themselves to risk.
What Comes Next
GBI is committed to building the tools and frameworks the industry needs to accelerate sustainability. That includes our Sustainable Data Center Playbook, a practical resource for teams navigating the complexity of designing, building, and certifying high-performance sustainable data centers, grounded in exactly the conversations that happened in Dallas.
We’ll see you in May 2027 for the fourth annual Better Buildings: Data Centers Seminar. In the meantime, the conversations don’t stop here.
Explore GBI’s certification programs for data centers and access the Sustainable Data Center Playbook at thegbi.org/data-center-playbook. To learn more about the GBI–iCA collaboration, read the full announcement.
