This document outlines the challenges and potential opportunities for creating a fair and equitable cloud infrastructure market. To understand the cloud market, its business models and infrastructure, it is helpful to compare it to another critical infrastructure sector – the energy sector. The similarities are striking. We can apply many of the regulatory and policy lessons-learned from the development of the energy sector to the cloud infrastructure industry, as the economic issues are so similar.

This document outlines the vision for a sustainable and accessible European cloud; one that will be open-source, fair, and create economic opportunities for all. Despite existing challenges, it is possible and  may soon become a reality. Such digital infrastructure will reflect European values and provide a blueprint that others around the world can draw inspiration from to further develop their own digital economies.

Concerns regarding the environment, energy efficiency, and compute density are playing a big role in the future of HPC facilities and data center designs. Liquid-cooling is an order of magnitude more efficient at cooling IT equipment, and as such, it is becoming an integral part of future strategies and a valuable alternative to air-cooling for existing data centers.

This paper describes the whole-systems approach and CEDaCI project outputs, including bespoke Eco-design guidelines, strategies, and digital tools to extend product life and recycling, and enable better decision-making to increase circularity in the DCI, prepare and support implementation of the EU Circular Economy Action Plan and ensure a secure, sustainable resource supply chain.

Small-scale data centers suffering from low cooling efficiency consume an intense power for reliable operation of IT equipment. In this study, thermal distribution in an air-cooled data center is simulated using an open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model to examine the underlying mechanism that reduces thermal and cooling efficiencies. The numerical model is validated with the temperature measurements conducted in the data center.

This paper explores how transparency and open data can be a viable sustainability strategy for data centers and also shows how you can implement this strategy.

An overview of relevant impact metrics - environmental, resource usage, waste and output flow based on the EN15804 +A2 standard for life cycle assessments in the construction sector.

On transparency and heat recovery, this new Directive is a major milestone. We look forward to supporting the implementation of the EED into law

Co-created and aggregated by the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance e.V. and the following collaborators, each of which is a signatory of the document: Jens Gröger, Marc Wilkens, Gaia Balzarini, Giuseppe Leto, Quentin Laurens, Raphael Daniel, Prof. Patricia Lago, Max Schulze.

With the Digital Environmental Footprint as the first activity on the Roadmap of the SDIA, we aim to bring together experts and make fruitful connections to develop an open methodology to assess the digital environmental footprint of digital products and services.

We have chosen to build on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, since the information revealed through performing an assessment can give us what we need to report on our environmental impact, improving digital products and services, and therefore our businesses.

Read our article on this paper on our blog.

We welcome this opportunity to share our comments on this recast of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED).

This paper is an output from our Steering Groups and sheds light on the opportunities and challenges to the genuine decarbonization of data centers.

Back-up power for data centers: A comprehensive study on the viability of batteries as the industry standard replacement for diesel generators.

Both energy and digitalization are on everybody's minds today. Both play increasingly important roles in our daily lives, yet few realise how interdependent these industries truly are. Digitalization promises to re-align our economy around data and computation, but the digital economy of tomorrow will be built on the shoulders of today’s electrical infrastructure. Fewer still can see the tremendous industrial and societal opportunities when two fundamental requirements of the digital age integrate.

In a joint statement of the SDIA with the Energieeffizienzverband für Wärme, Kälte und KWK e. V. (Energy Efficiency Association for Heating, Cooling and CHP - AGFW) and Bitkom e. V. we express the urgent need to adjust the definition of waste heat in the upcoming changes to the Combined Heat and Power Act (KWKG) in Germany in order to support the use of waste heat from data centers as a climate-neutral and sustainable energy source.