UMD experts and students to design 600-acre public nature reserve to clean the air and water surrounding a new Frederick area data center complex.
Data centers of the future could make environmental sustainability a key design focus.
Image Credit: Imaginary data center working in harmony with nature generated by DallE
The next big data center complex built in Maryland will feature more than just enormous buildings that guzzle electricity and hum in the night. It will include a 600-acre publicly accessible nature reserve designed specifically to soak up greenhouse gasses and other air pollution, buffer sound and manage rainwater runoff from the new buildings.
A team of ecological engineers, industrial ecologists and landscape architects from the University of Maryland are helping plan the grounds in partnership with the development company Quantum Loophole, which is building its newest data center community in Frederick County, MD.
“I saw this partnership as a way to potentially direct future growth in the world’s data infrastructure into a greener way of doing things,” said Dave Tilley, an associate professor of environmental science and technology and an expert in industrial ecology and ecological engineering.
As the backbone of the world’s IT infrastructure, data centers are huge concrete buildings filled with computer servers that store and process the world’s data. They take up large areas of land and use enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water. Their intensive use of resources and unsightly presence has spurred concerns over their environmental and social impact. Communities in Maryland often point to nearby Virginia, which is host to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, as an example of the type of development they do not want in their backyards.
But amid this pushback, the global data infrastructure is growing to accommodate increasing demand, especially from the rise of data-hungry artificial intelligence, and Tilley sees this partnership as a chance to get it right.
