Designing Data Centers of the Future is one of the first Frontier areas for exploration launched by the MIT Climate Project in 2025 through a Request for Proposals issues to MIT faculty and principal investigators.
Image: Data centers in Manassas, Virginia
Problem and Impact
Data centers underpin modern life, enabling communication, commerce, research, and social connection. In the United States alone, data centers consumed roughly 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 (over 4% of national demand) and used tens of billions of liters of water for cooling. Driven by a growing artificial intelligence market, U.S. data center electricity demand is expected to double or even triple by 2028, exerting increasing pressure on electric power infrastructure, grid decarbonization, water resources, and surrounding communities.
If co-designed with community input and interests in mind, next-generation data centers could lower community electricity costs, improve grid reliability, and remove competition for water resources while avoiding hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 e by 2035. Collectively, these advances can turn data centers into visible partners in community prosperity, climate resilience, and sustainable digital growth.
Vision
Data centers can be reimagined as community cornerstones rather than isolated industrial assets. Both large campuses and smaller edge compute pods can accelerate the deployment of cost-effective clean energy production, with hardware and software innovations continuing to drive orders of magnitude of efficiency gains over generations of transformative development. Modernized power and cooling systems, combined with intelligently orchestrated compute loads, can reduce grid stress even as energy use for compute increases. Together, these innovations allow data centers to return value through heat reuse, improve reliability, and emergency power and connectivity, creating infrastructure that supports community well-being and sustainable digital growth.
Example Areas for Innovation
- Integrating community and data center power systems, including modeling of both data center and community power demands, and especially looking to future scenarios.
- Partnering to expand access to carbon-free electricity through community engagement, financial innovations and policies to power data centers and surrounding communities.
- Developing new carbon-free electricity sources and short- and long-term energy storage technologies.
- Impacting climate through compute efficiency by advancing semiconductor processing, chip architectures, interconnects, and algorithms.
- Maximizing power utilization through new materials and systems that reduce the use of energy and water in cooling or the energy use in power conversion, data storage, and interconnections.
- Understanding ecosystem and community impacts, including developing approaches to maximize the benefits of data centers to local communities and environments.
- Siting for data centers and tools that consider current and future community needs, including integration with local ecosystems.
- Computing at the edge for community with smaller, distributed data centers that can pilot new technologies, such as advanced cooling and flexible energy consumption.