By Melisa Simic, Pauxi Group
This chapter is an excerpt from Greener Data: Volume Three, launched on Earth Day 2026. Featuring perspectives from 75+ sustainability leaders across the digital infrastructure ecosystem, the full book is available now on Amazon.
The digital infrastructure boom presents an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate responsible development at scale. As global investors manage increasingly complex portfolios, the data center sector stands at a critical juncture where environmental stewardship and technological progress can — and must — align.
The Current Landscape
The numbers tell a compelling story. The United States has expanded from roughly 1,000 data centers six years ago to more than 5,000 today1, with artificial intelligence driving demand that will require more new facilities in the next decade than were built in the previous three combined. This expansion creates both challenges and opportunities for innovative approaches to infrastructure development.
Site selection has become intensely competitive, with developers balancing electrical grid capacity, fiber proximity, zoning requirements and infrastructure costs. Meanwhile, biologists emphasize protecting critical habitats where micro-endemic species and specialized wildlife communities exist.2 This convergence demands a more sophisticated approach to development — one that views environmental considerations as strategic advantages rather than regulatory hurdles.
Understanding America’s Regulatory Framework
The US environmental framework, established primarily in the 1970s with landmark legislation including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, reflects a different era’s infrastructure needs and priorities. NEPA, while foundational, remains purely procedural3 — requiring environmental review for federally connected projects but providing no substantive environmental protection mandates.
Twenty states have adopted their own (mini-NEPA) environmental review requirements, creating a complex regulatory landscape where federal, state, and local agencies navigate overlapping obligations. This fragmented approach often leaves critical environmental gaps, particularly for private developments on private land that don’t trigger federal review.
The challenge is intensified in the Southeast, where virtually all land is privately owned. Conservation research reveals that private land comprises almost 70% of areas with important concentrations of unprotected, imperiled species. Many rare species exist outside formal federal endangered species listings, often due to bureaucratic processes rather than conservation needs.4
Water: A Critical Consideration
Water consumption offers significant opportunity for innovative solutions. State-level water law varies dramatically across the United States, with many states treating water use as individual privilege rather than managing it through integrated, basin-wide approaches.
This fragmentation stems from two primary legal doctrines: the riparian rights system in eastern states, where property owners adjacent to water sources can use water based on land ownership without permits, and the prior appropriation doctrine in western states, which grants individual water rights based on “first in time, first in right” priority that function like private property. Both systems emphasize individual user entitlements over comprehensive watershed management, creating a patchwork of regulations where neighboring states may have completely different approaches to water allocation and conservation.
Texas exemplifies both the challenge and the opportunity. With over 400 operating data centers and approximately 70 more planned, the state faces an increasingly urgent water crisis5. Yet Texas doesn’t require data centers to report projected water usage, creating planning challenges for communities6. Similar gaps exist elsewhere—Alabama, for instance, allows property owners to extract water from adjacent rivers without permits7. According to the Alabama Rivers Alliance, businesses using more than 100,000 gallons of water daily are required to file a certificate and declare the water usage as beneficial, but the reporting is largely self-regulated without meaningful oversight, and penalties are nonexistent for non-compliance.
These regulatory gaps underscore why proactive industry leadership has become essential. When frameworks struggle to keep pace with development pressures, industry stakeholders can lead with solutions that balance economic opportunity with resource stewardship.
Staying Curious: What Comprehensive Environmental Management Looks Like
Europe provides valuable lessons in comprehensive environmental management through interconnected policy frameworks that demonstrate how protection and development can work in harmony. The EU’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive and Habitats Directive function as separate yet interlocking systems, working together to safeguard protected habitats and species. The EU’s no-net-loss policies extend this protection across all ecosystems, not merely endangered species habitats, embodying an elegantly simple principle: the natural capital we possess today should be no less tomorrow, even as we develop the infrastructure necessary for economic growth.
The Natura 2000 network exemplifies this balanced approach in practice. Created under the Habitats and Birds Directives, this EU-wide protected area network operates on the basis of coexistence rather than exclusion.8 Many sites remain productive working landscapes, including farmland, forests, and private estates. The innovation lies not in changing ownership — around 60% of Natura 2000 land remains privately owned9 — but in transforming management approaches.
Similarly, the Water Framework Directive offers an enlightening model by managing water resources according to natural river basins rather than political boundaries. Each basin maintains a comprehensive River Basin Management Plan, updated every six years, that considers every water use within the entire catchment context. This holistic approach has sparked innovations in green infrastructure, habitat integration, and community co-benefits that extend far beyond water management alone.
These European frameworks illustrate how comprehensive environmental policy can foster both protection and prosperity. While these examples are neither perfect nor free from legitimate criticism, they demonstrate the importance of staying curious, humble, and creative when exploring collective solutions. The path forward requires this spirit of inquiry—remaining open to learning from diverse approaches while continuously refining our methods to make truly informed decisions about our shared environmental future.
Building Community Trust Through Genuine Engagement
The real transformation occurs when developers engage authentically with the communities where they’re building, and I’m encouraged by emerging examples of companies that understand this fundamental principle. Forward-thinking developers now conduct voluntary town halls and community forums well before breaking ground, extending their engagement far beyond minimum regulatory requirements.
Local knowledge proves invaluable—residents understand wildlife corridors, flooding patterns, recreational areas and cultural sites that desktop studies might miss. This information enables project designs that enhance rather than degrade community assets. This proactive approach yields tangible benefits: these projects typically face fewer delays, encounter less opposition, and often uncover unexpected opportunities for mutual benefit. More importantly, this genuine community engagement helps establish and maintain the crucial social license to operate—that essential foundation of trust and acceptance that no regulation can mandate but every successful project requires.
The difference lies in moving from consultation as compliance to conversation as partnership. When developers invest time in understanding community concerns, aspirations, and local knowledge early in the process, they create space for solutions that serve both development goals and community needs.
The Path Forward: Three Strategic Priorities
No single company, no matter how well-intentioned or well-resourced, can solve these challenges alone. A single data center facility might implement exemplary environmental practices, but if neighboring facilities follow different standards, the cumulative regional impact can still be devastating. Wildlife doesn’t recognize property boundaries. Water systems don’t respect corporate jurisdictions. Climate impacts aggregate across all our individual contributions.
The scale and urgency of infrastructure expansion require coordinated, sector-wide responses. Three key areas offer the greatest potential for collective progress:
•Build Authentic Partnerships: Create ongoing dialogue forums between developers, regulators and communities. Establish clear channels for community input and develop decision-making processes that incorporate diverse perspectives from the outset rather than as afterthoughts.
•Share Knowledge Across the Sector: When companies develop innovative environmental solutions, that knowledge should benefit the entire industry. Industry-wide databases of successful mitigation strategies, shared research on ecological impacts and collaborative monitoring approaches can accelerate sector-wide improvement.
•Embrace humility, curiosity, and creativity as a powerful triad for environmental innovation: In today’s environmentally conscious marketplace, organizations that design digital infrastructure to enhance rather than degrade ecological systems will not only meet growing expectations but will position themselves as leaders in both technological advancement and environmental stewardship. This approach requires the intellectual honesty to question existing methods, the inquisitive drive to understand complex ecological systems, and the imaginative capacity to envision solutions that seemed impossible before.
•By viewing environmental protection as a catalyst for innovation rather than a constraint, companies can harness this mindset to transform sustainability challenges into competitive advantages.
The Opportunity Ahead
The choice isn’t between meeting digital demand or protecting the environment—that’s a false contradiction serving no one’s long-term interests. The real choice is between thoughtful collaboration serving both goals or a race to the bottom serving neither.
We can build essential digital infrastructure while creating positive environmental and community outcomes, but only through coordinated effort. The decisions made in the next few years will determine whether the digital revolution enhances or degrades the natural systems sustaining all life on Earth.
The opportunity is before us. The question is whether we’ll seize it together.
RESOURCES
1. Statista Research Department. “Number of Data Centers Worldwide as of November 2025, by Country or Territory.” Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1228433/data-centers-worldwide-by-country/
2. The Darter Fish and the Data Center. Inside Climate News. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16062025/the-darter-fish-and-the-data-center/
3. Federal Register : Revision of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Procedures. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/03/2025-12383/revision-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-procedures?utm_source=chatgpt.com
4. This Map Shows Where Biodiversity Is Most at Risk in America. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/03/climate/biodiversity-map.html
5. Running Out: Texas’ water crisis — and the path forward. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/11/texas-water-supply-crisis/
6. Martinez, Alejandra. Data centers are thirsty for Texas’ water, but state planners don’t know how much they will need. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/25/texas-data-center-water-use/
7. Alabamians Want Answers About a Four-Million-Square-Foot Data Center Coming to Their Backyards. Inside Climate News. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11052025/bessemer-alabama-proposed-data-center/
8. Natura 2000 sites designated under the EU Habitats and Birds Directives | Indicators | European Environment Agency (EEA). https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/natura-2000-sites-designated-under9. FORESTS AND NATURA 2000 – GUIDANCE DOCUMENT. European Union. https://circabc.europa.eu/sd/a/41f417db-d69d-4f37-9870-6eb5dc0f1577/20150508%20Guide%20N2000%20%20Forests%20Part%20I-II-Annexes.pdf
Author: Courtney Burrows
Courtney Burrows is the Executive Editor of Greener Data and Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sustainability at JSA, where she leads content strategy across PR, marketing, and media initiatives for the global digital infrastructure industry. With more than 20 years of experience — and over a decade dedicated to data centers — she curates expert insights focused on data center sustainability, innovation, and the evolving demands of an AI-driven world.
