Shared infrastructure, shared value
Designing data centres for efficiency, resilience and community benefit
As data centre demand accelerates, performance is being judged against an ever-broader set of outcomes. Continued expansion will depend on the industry coming together to meet a higher standard, with developers, operators, engineers, planners and technology partners aligning around shared priorities.
Data centres at the forefront of change have moved away from component-by-component optimisation in favour of decisions that reduce resource demand, strengthen resilience and improve relationships with surrounding communities.
Design for whole-system performance
With performance measures broadening well beyond PUE, including a greater focus on ERF, ERE and EED requirements in Europe, system-level performance increasingly depends on how equipment, controls and water systems are specified and operated together.
Liquid cooling is one of the clearest examples of how whole-system thinking is being applied in practice. Better-performing sites are aligning cooling architecture, pumping, heat exchange and controls so that gains in one area are not sacrificed elsewhere.
Build water resilience through greater control
Around 40% of data centres operate in regions facing high or extremely high water risk, making long-term water availability a strategic concern for continued operation and expansion.
The strongest schemes treat water availability as a design constraint from the outset. Engineers are building water-management and monitoring requirements into projects, creating frameworks for reuse, treatment and control of the water cycle that reduce dependence on incoming freshwater. Together, such measures give operators greater visibility over long-term demand, while offering planners confidence in how water demand will be managed over the life of an individual data centre.
Design for community value
Where planning, permitting and energy constraints shape development, projects that demonstrate value beyond the site boundary are much better placed to build a case for approval and long-term operation.
Wider community value can be delivered through measures such as digital water monitoring, renewable energy exchange for community use, integration into net-zero districts and solutions enabling more than 80% of power generation onsite.
Early engagement with water and wastewater utilities is critical to reducing pressure on shared infrastructure and opening up opportunities around reuse and resilience. Water, energy and heat requirements should be mapped against local infrastructure and demand during the design process, with utilities and potential heat users involved before assumptions are built into site strategy.
Heat recovery is a useful test case. Where district heating networks or nearby users exist, higher-grade recoverable heat can strengthen the case for development. Conversely, where suitable networks or local demand are absent, identifying that constraint early will inform both site selection and system design.
The challenge is no longer simply to optimise the site, but to make better decisions across the systems, networks and infrastructure on which it depends.
Choose partners with system-wide capability
Delivering whole-system performance ultimately requires expertise spanning design, operation, planning and technology. The strongest partnerships should bring together capability across cooling, pumping, treatment, reuse, monitoring and controls, ensuring decisions are made across disciplines rather than in isolation.
Xylem’s portfolio shows what that breadth looks like in practice. High-efficiency heat exchangers can deliver energy savings of up to 40% in applications such as direct-to-chip liquid cooling. Lowara pumps and Hydrovar X can reduce the energy required by the data centre water cycle, while capabilities in treatment, reuse, metering and monitoring extend that contribution across the wider water system.
Such system-wide capability allows individual technology choices to contribute to a wider infrastructure strategy, strengthening data centre performance as well as the resilience of the networks and communities on which it depends. When there’s a close connection between what happens inside the data centre and the value created beyond its boundary, shared infrastructure becomes shared value.