Sustainable data centers: Beyond IT, powering the AI future
- 25 Jul 2025
- 8 min
In an era where AI workloads are redefining data center power demands, a critical paradox persists: the relentless focus on optimizing IT equipment, while essential, overlooks the equally vital role of physical infrastructure. This singular approach creates a "do more, make it worse" scenario. CIOs, driven to reduce energy consumption through IT efficiency, often inadvertently neglect the profound impact of Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) systems. While flexible consumption models and colocation offer valuable contributions, they alone cannot deliver true data center sustainability.
- 45%of total electricity consumption within a data center is due to IT equipment
- 88%of business leaders intend to increase investments in IT
The hard reality is that IT equipment, primarily servers working with cooling systems, constitute the largest energy consumers within a data center. They account for as much as 45% of total electricity consumption. By concentrating solely on IT improvements, we risk overlooking significant energy savings and efficiency gains achievable through an optimized power and cooling infrastructure.
Yet, leaders want to move toward sustainability. In fact, 88% of business leaders intend to increase investments in IT to advance sustainability efforts. Brand reputation, energy cost, business resilience and regulatory pressure are top factors in increasing IT sustainability investments.
Sustainable change is everyone’s responsibility. Placing the primary burden for sustainability goals on IT specialists like manufacturers and system integrators, neglects the crucial, and often costly, interdependencies between IT and physical infrastructure.
The industry's structural divide between IT and Facility (MEP) expertise exacerbates this paradox. Technology vendors and service providers typically specialize in one domain, creating a "Law of the Instrument" scenario where each party focuses on its area of expertise. This compartmentalization hinders a holistic view of data center sustainability, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. For instance, migrating workloads to colocation or cloud environments may reduce on-premise IT energy consumption, but existing physical infrastructure often remains, operating inefficiently because of the reduced load, thus incurring unnecessary costs.
Historically, IT leaders have underemphasized the importance of power and cooling infrastructure, viewing it as a static utility rather than a strategic component to be aligned with IT needs. However, the AI power surge, with its voracious power and cooling demands for accelerated computing, has exposed the limitations of this approach. This siloed approach pits IT sustainability against infrastructure sustainability. Moreover, finding vendors capable of bridging this divide or cultivating alliances between manufacturers of different domains remains a significant challenge. The absence of holistic views leads to competing targets between CIOs and COOs/CFOs, ultimately impacting the bottom line. The need to balance CAPEX, OPEX, and TOTEX is critical and must be aligned across the organization to mitigate cost and risk.
When there is a disconnect between CIOs, who focus on IT, and COOs/CFOs, who oversee facilities, it creates a misalignment of needs and success factors. This often results in missed opportunities for cost savings and efficiency gains. While both parties share overlapping responsibilities in areas like space planning, power and cooling operations, and environmental monitoring, the lack of collaboration hinders optimal outcomes. Rightsizing both IT and physical infrastructure is essential for sustainability, yet it remains unattainable without cross-domain cooperation.
The interdependencies between IT equipment and power and cooling infrastructure are profound and costly. Server density directly impacts cooling and UPS requirements, while power consumption influences UPS sizing and efficiency.
Inefficient cooling creates a negative feedback loop, increasing power usage and operational costs. For instance, if IT equipment is made more efficient or workloads are moved to colocation or cloud, the existing power and cooling infrastructure, designed for a specific IT capacity or workloads, may operate inefficiently. This inefficiency leads to wasted energy and increased expenses. Understanding the specific trade-offs requires modeling scenarios to see the impacts of various conditions. Doing so allows for a better understanding of energy consumption, operational costs, and embodied carbon, and increases the risk of not meeting growing regulatory requirements.
Rightsized and oversized IT and physical infrastructure – a comparison
The data calculated in Schneider Electric’s Tradeoff Tools – the Data Center Efficiency & PUE Calculator in this case – illustrate the effect of isolated steps that aim to achieve energy consumption reductions, and how this has a direct negative impact on other systems that are part of the bigger data center system.
The chart below shows how single-sided activities can lead to the "do more, make it worse" paradox, as reflected in the PUE values for a specific scenario and the changes applied.
These calculations suggest that reducing compute load through consolidation and other means in the data center, combined with rightsizing MEP equipment, is a viable option for achieving gains in data center resource efficiency from both environmental and commercial perspectives.
However, a lack of collaboration between departments hinders the ability to meet sustainability targets and reporting requirements, which are increasingly under regulatory scrutiny. By connecting these dots, we reveal the critical need for a unified approach that integrates IT and physical infrastructure strategies, ensuring your data center is not only sustainable but also ready for the AI-driven future.
The sustainability paradox, amplified by industry silos and exacerbated by internal company silos and the demands of AI, necessitates a paradigm shift: a unified, cross-domain strategy. This is not aspirational; it's a strategic imperative. To achieve holistic sustainability, IT leaders must champion the following key steps:
Foster Collaboration: Break down the walls between IT and facilities and infrastructure teams. Establish clear lines of communication and create a culture of shared responsibility. Consider engaging a "Sherpa" – a trusted advisor capable of bridging these domains and facilitating seamless integration. This includes governance for sustainability ambitions and calculating baseline data to help teams within the silos identify their impact across different areas. It also involves defining an integrated strategy for IT and facilities to optimize energy use.
Establish Shared, Measurable Goals: Define mutually aligned sustainability goals and metrics. While Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a common metric, true progress requires a broader perspective. Flagging interdependencies will help focus on areas that need a higher amount of synchronized actions to achieve improvements.
This table below, first published in one of Schneider Electric’s whitepapers, suggests metrics that can be implemented based on the maturity of your sustainability journey. IT and Facility operations teams should define mutually acceptable KPIs, especially in areas where IT-related resource consumption is directly connected to facility-based consumption. Doing so will create awareness of interdependencies and enable active management. Examples from this table include total energy consumption, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), and total site water usage.
Seek Integrated Solutions and Partnerships: Look beyond siloed offerings. Prioritize vendors and solutions that provide integrated approaches to IT and infrastructure management. Vendor alliances, such as those forged by Schneider Electric and leading IT providers to address cross-domain challenges, offer a powerful pathway to seamless integration.
One concrete outcome of alliances between vendors focusing on complementary domains in the data center is the co-creation of offers and services, as demonstrated in the work between Dell and Schneider Electric to create data center sustainability services that address the challenge of finding a holistic approach to data center sustainability.
Embrace Data-Driven Decision-Making: Move beyond the single pane of glass for IT resource monitoring and management; expand your views to the strategic deployment of modern Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM), Building Management Systems (BMS), and Electrical Power Monitoring Systems (EPMS). These systems are critical for creating transparency and enabling informed decisions in operating data centers efficiently and resiliently.
Solutions to help data center operators embrace data-driven decision-making
Leveraging these systems empowers IT leaders to gain granular visibility into energy consumption across IT and facilities infrastructure. This allows them to precisely identify optimization opportunities, implement impactful improvements, meticulously track progress, quantify the success of sustainability initiatives, and confidently make data-driven decisions that drive enhanced efficiency, reliability, and overall sustainability.
The partnership between Dell Technologies and Schneider Electric exemplifies the power of integrated solutions. Our combined expertise delivers:
1. Optimize Infrastructure: Power and cooling infrastructure meticulously designed for specific IT deployments, ensuring maximum efficiency.
2. Holistic Management: Integrated management tools that provide a unified view of data center performance, eliminating blind spots and enabling proactive optimization. This can be achieved by adding energy and water consumption data collected after implementing a foundational metering strategy for the data center grey space and providing insights from gathered data through specific dashboards for the data center operator.
3. Streamlined Operations: This solution provides both the CIO and CFO/COO with a simplified deployment that reduces operational complexity, minimizes downtime and maximizes agility. These solutions deliver quantifiable benefits: improved energy efficiency, reduced operational costs, and simplified management.
"By aligning IT and infrastructure strategies, we are enabling our clients to achieve their sustainability goals while powering their AI-driven future."
- Matt Liebowitz, Dell
The time for stepwise, isolated, or incremental improvements is over. CIOs and IT directors must lead the charge in embracing a holistic vision for data center sustainability. This requires CIOs and IT directors to:
Identify the Right Ally for Facilities
Find you copilot who will sit in the front seats and lead action.
Align Strategy and Unify Efforts
Re-evaluate strategies, create mutual interests, and define actions that support both domains.
Expand on KPIs and Goals
Ensure measurements are relevant for the system, not just the single silo. Redefine what to measure, how to measure it, and where impacts are made, avoiding the "do more, make it worse" scenario.
Find the Right Partner in Your Network
Evaluate your partners' tech alliances that can help you span steps across domains (IT, MEP/Facility). Determine their expertise in covering a holistic approach.
Emphasize Long-Term Benefits
Based on a holistic vision and strategy, emphasize long-term benefits, including environmental impact, operational cost, and business resilience (uptime, availability). Play the game beyond environmental sustainability. It’s not just about going to market together; it’s about building integrated offerings that can stack and deliver unique value.
By adopting these principles, IT leaders can transform their data centers into sustainable, resilient, and future-ready assets, capable of powering the AI revolution.
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