With A.I. workloads climbing, sustainable data infrastructure, especially in the Nordics region, may offer a blueprint for balancing growth and ESG. Unsplash

The A.I. market has seen unprecedented growth in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down. According to a UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report, the global A.I. market is projected to surge from $189 billion in 2023 to $4.8 trillion by 2033—a 25-fold increase in just a decade. This growth is unsurprising given the wide-ranging benefits A.I. can bring to businesses across all sectors. From operational efficiency to data-driven analysis to personalization of products and services, A.I. has become a critical factor in company competitiveness and long-term viability.

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Yet, more recently, awareness has grown around A.I.’s environmental impact. Every digital activity, from internet banking to media streaming, triggers processes in a data center. The rise of A.I. and other high-performance computing, such as computer-aided design simulations or financial trading analytics, has fueled an enormous demand for high-density, ’A.I.-ready’ data centers that can accommodate more powerful CPUs and GPUs and more complex storage architectures. Projects such as the E.U.’s €200 billion InvestAI initiative and the U.S.’s $500 billion Stargate project evidence the incredible global investment in digital infrastructure.

Such data centers require access to vast power supplies, ultrahigh-speed networks and sophisticated cooling systems. Due to limited space, power and network capacity, these needs can be difficult to accommodate within legacy data center sites, which has no doubt fueled the thriving data center development industry that we see today. 

The future of A.I. is powerful

Data centers have always had significant energy requirements to power and cool their equipment, but as IT workloads become more data-intensive, it follows that energy demands also increase. Where a traditional enterprise data center might have had a power requirement of five to 10 megawatts (MW), today’s facilities often require........

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