Switch Datacenters, CoolIT Systems Partnership Targets Data Center Energy Consumption, Sustainability

Switch Datacenters and CoolIT Systems are partnering to "significantly curtail energy and water consumption inherent in modern data centers," the two companies said.

Switch Datacenters, founded in 2010, is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The company is not to be confused with the similarly named Switch of Las Vegas, Nevada, United States.

CoolIT Systems, based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, provides liquid cooling solutions for data centers, high-performance computing (HPC) environments, cloud service providers and even the desktop market. Global investment firm KKR acquired CoolIT Systems in May 2023.

CoolIT and Switch Datacenters Partnership: Liquid Cooling Can Reduce Energy Bills

The CoolIT-Switch Datacenters partnership should provide clear ROI, according to Peggy Burroughs, director of CoolIT Next. For intance, CoolIT's DLC and RDHx technologies have been "instrumental in various data center heat reuse projects for years, with customers reporting at minimum a savings of 10% on energy bills (OPEX), more than 50% on CAPEX spends, and examples of PUE lowered from 1.30 to 1.02," Burroughs said in a prepared statement.

In a prepared statement about the CoolIT Systems partnership, Switch Datacenters CEO Gregor Snip said: "CoolIT is the right company to help make our vision a reality at an industrial scale. Both CoolIT and Switch Datacenters have shared the same passion for sustainable innovation for years and truly want to elevate the industry's adoption of liquid cooling. We believe liquid cooling will be the game-changer in the next wave of sustainable data center designs, and CoolIT is one of the very few companies that can lead this upcoming demand, thanks to their long history of innovation, reliability, breadth of portfolio, and capabilities to scale with their numerous IT partners worldwide."

Green IT and Sustainable Data Centers: Milestones and Trends

Meanwhile, dozens of hardware, software, cloud and sustainability companies are striving to reduce data center carbon footprints. Example efforts and milestones include:

• Open Source: OpenUK and the United Nations are seeking contributors to develop carbon neutral solutions for data centers.
• Innovation Hub: Danfoss, Google, Microsoft and Schneider Electric launched the Net Zero Innovation Hub For Data Centers. The hub, based in Fredericia, Denmark, will "bring together the data center sector across Europe to find concrete solutions to accelerate the green transition," the founders said.
• Data Center Carbon Emissions Software Tools: Emerging options include the Dynatrace Carbon Impact App, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator dashboard; Nutanix Carbon and Power Estimator tool; Schneider Electric' Data Center Carbon Footprint Calculator; and VMware Carbon Emissions Explorer Dashboard.
• Partnership: Start Campus will leverage sustainable water cooling from Nautilus Data Technologies and IT monitoring services from Kyndryl for a massive, sustainable hyperscale data center project in Europe.

Sustainable Data Centers: Funding and Build-Outs

Multiple companies are investing in sustainable data centers. Among the milestones to note:

• July 2023: GreenSquareDC, a data center technology startup focused on Green IT and sustainability, joined NVIDIA Inception, an accelerator program designed to nurture startups.
• July 2023: Global IT consulting firm HCLTech and Schneider Electric are partnering to develop energy- and carbon-efficient solutions for data center customers in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.
• July 2023: Digital Realty will leverage IBM Envizi ESG software suite to gather and manage sustainability data across more than 300 data centers worldwide, the two companies disclosed today.
• June 2023: evroc, a startup backed by EQT Ventures and Norrsken VC, is striving to build Europe's first sovereign hyperscale cloud business that leverages sustainable energy, the company said.

Additional Green Data Center Milestones

Additional worldwide developments include:

• United States: Climate Adaptive Infrastructure (CAI), through a relationship with DigitalBridge, plans to invest up to $300 million in sustainable digital infrastructure. The first investment involves Switch, a 100% renewable-powered data center provider.
• Latin America: Aligned Data Centers in May 2023 completed the acquisition of Latin America data center provider ODATA. Roughly 85% to 90% of the energy consumed by ODATA is renewable. The M&A deal was first announced in December 2022. Financial terms were not disclosed.
• Africa: Raxio Data Centres has lined up a US$170 million debt facility to further expand operations across Africa. The twist? The debt facility -- involving Roha Group, Meridiam, Proparco and the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund -- is tied to various sustainability and ESG (environmental, social & governance) goals.
• Brazil: Scala Data Centers has achieved 100% Scope 3, as recommended by the GHG Protocol.
• Europe: AQ Compute and CBRE in 2022 partnered as part of a push to make AQ Compute a "pan-European leader in providing global clients with data centre services." All of the AQ Compute data centers are expected to leverage 100 % renewable energy, the companies said.
• Europe: Alces Flight and EcoDataCenter partnered to provide customers with "best-of-breed managed services and sustainable computing for their private research clouds," the two companies said.

Related: Track all green data center news here.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Switch Data Centers as a U.S.-based company. We corrected the company location and background on February 2, 2024.