The European Union is driving major sustainability initiatives with far-reaching impacts across the data center industry. New targets and reporting mandates are being rolled out under the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Energy Efficiency Directive (EED). However, the complexity increases as individual EU member states layer on additional unique requirements, as Germany has already done.
While the sustainability reporting requirements may seem straightforward at first glance, aligning OCP’s Community efforts and focus with standardized KPI frameworks like ISO/IEC 30134 and others, the actual implementation is proving quite challenging. A particularly thorny issue is establishing a consistent methodology for calculating and reporting carbon disclosure across organizations.
These new environmental regulations come at a time when the accelerating buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure is driving significant growth in data center deployments. This AI expansion is amplifying power consumption demands as well as straining cooling capabilities – both with potential environmental ramifications.
This panel dove into and provides an in-depth look at the emerging EU sustainability directives and their global ripple effects. We explored how OCP’s specification and other standardization efforts can help ease the compliance burden on data center operators.