Cleaner grid or smarter cooling? Environmental impact trade-offs of a data center using the life cycle assessment method

• Cradle-to-grave LCA of a hyperscale data center over 25 years. • Operational electricity use is the dominant environmental burden. • Three scenarios compare cleaner grid and smart cooling strategies. • Combined strategy achieves about 43% reduction in global warming potential. • Results highlight the joint role of energy source and efficiency in design. The environmental impacts of data centers have been widely recognized and assessed through life cycle approaches. Although numerous mitigation strategies have been proposed to minimize these environmental impacts, the consequences and trade-offs introduced by implementing these strategies have not been systematically evaluated. We conduct a comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) to examine the environmental impacts of a representative hyperscale data center located in Virginia, United States. Using detailed inventory data from the OpenLCA software and the Ecoinvent database, we quantify greenhouse gas emissions and nine additional environmental impact categories. Our study shows that over 99% of the data center’s total environmental impacts result from electricity consumption. Hence, an effective mitigation strategy to this challenge should focus on the efficiency of electricity use and optimizing the environmental impacts of the strategy. Unlike prior studies focusing on global warming potential (GWP) alone, this study evaluates three specific mitigation strategies that target the environmental impacts of data centers: (1) transitioning to a cleaner electricity grid in the United States, (2) enhancing power usage effectiveness (PUE), an indicator widely adopted by the industry to reflect cooling system efficiency, and (3) the combination of these two strategies. Our results reveal that supplying data centers with a cleaner electricity grid significantly reduces GWP by 28.2%, exceeding the 20.8% reduction achieved by improving PUE to 1.1. However, a cleaner grid simultaneously increases respiratory effects and eutrophication potential. Enhancing PUE does not bring negative impacts on environmental categories. An integrated approach, combining cleaner grid usage and enhanced PUE, has been proven to be a solution that effectively balances the highest possible reduction with 43.1% in greenhouse gas emissions, with mitigation of respiratory effects and eutrophication potential inherent in transitioning to cleaner grids. Our study highlights the necessity of evaluating the environmental impacts of mitigation strategies and considering the complementary effects of different strategies to substantially enhance data center sustainability.