Data Centers as Community Contributors
Facilitators:
Associate Director
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Associate Professor of Architecture
Executive Director, MITEI Future Energy Systems Center
Key Takeaways from Session
- Across the session, participants treated data centers as a coupled system— hardware, buildings, grid, water, and communities—where the binding constraints are increasingly “non-compute” (interconnection, permitting, localized supply chains, and social license).
- Members shared insights into what’s needed to meet the moment in U.S. infrastructure, energy and materials and expressed the need to understand the least cost and emissions path to accomplish that infrastructure build out. Central to the discussion was what that could mean for local communities in terms of affordability, but also power reliability and resilience.
- Within energy, the binding challenges clustered around queue/interconnection management, permitting pace, and cost allocation for grid upgrades.
- Within infrastructure, buildings must be treated as localized value chains: low-carbon cement/SCM availability varies by market, and plant-level embodied-carbon differences matter.
- Within materials, recovery and reuse as a supply-chain resilience/domestic security lever and hardware reuse as asset-management (matching workloads to older racks; designing systems to tolerate degraded components). Reuse/recycling ecosystems already exist (e.g., IT asset disposition networks), but need awareness, incentives, and better measurement to scale.
- This workshop deepened the MCSC’s understanding of how to support its members to consider future data centers such that they have reduced embodied and operational carbon and water consumption while making a contribution to surrounding communities.