Sustainable Innovation in Data Centre Design: From Seawater Cooling to Green Infrastructure
Source: Google Data Centers. ‘An overhead view of one of our cooling plants in Hamina, where seawater from the Gulf of Finland entirely cools the data center there.’
Technology infrastructure like data centres remain mission-critical — powering everything from global business to AI, cloud, and connectivity. And while developers and hyperscalers continue to scale up facility builds, there’s a growing wave of sustainability-led innovation shaping how these sites are designed, built, and operated.
Google’s Hamina facility in Finland taps into seawater cooling from the Gulf of Finland, running chilled deep-sea water through heat exchangers to cool servers — entirely eliminating energy-intensive chillers.
Meanwhile, Meta’s Odense, Denmark campus captures ~215 GWh of waste heat annually — powering its district heating network and heating ~12,000 homes.
In Stockholm, data centres already feed into the city’s heat grid. Systems like ‘Stockholm Data Parks’ aim to repurpose data-centre heat to supply up to 10% of urban heating by 2035, with about 3.5% currently reported.
AI workloads are also becoming more efficient. Google recently reported that the median Gemini text query consumes just 0.24 Wh of energy — about nine seconds of watching TV. More importantly, energy use per query has dropped 33x in the past year, while the associated carbon footprint has fallen 44x (Google Research). This shows that as demand for compute accelerates, innovation is making each query dramatically less energy-intensive.
The same principle applies to physical infrastructure. From seawater cooling to waste-heat reuse, world-class facilities are embedding sustainability into their very design — accelerating growth while delivering efficiency, performance, and community benefits at scale.
At PGP, we deliver on-the-ground impact with sustainable infrastructure that matters.
Through our partnership with Viritopia, we help clients install:
→ Living green roofs that boost insulation, reduce heat absorption, and support urban biodiversity
→ Green walls that sequester CO₂, enhance facades, and absorb stormwater
→ Full systems integration for rainwater management, habitat creation, aesthetic enhancement, and long-term resilience
These solutions are modular, scalable, cost-effective, and increasingly seen as essentials by planners, occupiers, and climate-conscious investors and customers.
