New ‘Zero-Impact’ Data Center Announced in Italy Promises Clean Processing
This year’s severe drought has dramatically reduced water levels in Italy’s famous Brenta River.
Credit: Simone Padovani/Getty Images
A new data center project in Florence, Italy, could provide a blueprint for how other data center developments could be structured, eliminating many of the environmental problems people associate with these enormous compute projects. Promising to be “zero-impact,” the large-scale facility is being built alongside renewable energy infrastructure to ensure it doesn’t drive enormous greenhouse gas emissions or strain local power supplies.
Data centers are swiftly becoming one of the major installations people would do anything to keep away from. They can lead to skyrocketing power prices, contaminated water sources, and an ever-present droning noise. To help alleviate at least the environmental and utility effects of such a facility, this new one set to be built in Florence is doing so hand in hand with a new renewable energy complex.
IT service provider Comtel is developing the project, and though it hasn’t detailed the size of the compute installation, its precise size, or eventual cost, it has shared how the center will be powered. Designed to form part of a new renewable energy complex, the data center will rely on solar panels for power, while waste heat from its servers is set to be siphoned for use in food production elsewhere on the campus.
Comtel released a render of how the renewable energy hub and data center might look.
Credit: Comtel
The site at Figline Valdarno was previously occupied by a steel cord manufacturer, but after closing in 2018, it has sat idle. Now it’s set for a resurgence as part of this new consortium project, with various elements including a data center.
Data Center Dynamics claims planning permission is still needed, so the project may change shape before it breaks ground, but the plan feels more robust than most data centers. It’s certainly considered things more than the Elon Musk-owned Colossus and Colossus 2 facilities, which used mobile gas turbines without environmental permits to accelerate deployment, at great cost to local air quality and the environment.
It is worth pointing out, though, that this new data center is likely to be smaller than many of the major ones. A solar plant is unlikely to power the multi-gigawatt data centers some companies are developing, but the ethos is the right one. Renewable power, utilizing waste—it’s much better than just burning heaps of gas to help generate random images to post on social media.
