Submer Group: Data Centers Must Build for the Long Term

Sustainability, when it even enters the conversation for data centers today, means different things to different people. It is a broad topic, including energy use, water use, e-waste, and the effects of rapid growth. Gabriel Lazar, head of sustainability at Submer, a  Barcelona-based full-stack data center company, sees a need for both greater specificity and more comprehensive systems thinking as part of organizational strategies.

In a recent discussion with Gabriel and Solidigm’s Ace Stryker, Gabriel laid out a pragmatic framework for thinking about data center impact: one that spans energy, community relationships, and the uncomfortable question of whether the industry is using what it builds.

The Cost of Growth Without Durability

The data center industry is struggling with sustainability, and Gabriel is direct about it. About half of data center operators don’t even have sustainability plans in place. Many companies that do have them are still moving in the wrong direction. Part of the difficulty is the recent push for higher performance and scale hasn’t considered what will make what is being built now durable for years to come.

What the industry needs, Gabriel argued, is a genuine reduction in resource intensity, pursued with enough specificity to actually be achieved. He expressed optimism that data centers and digital infrastructure can continue to have a smaller environmental footprint than heavy industries like steel making or car manufacturing. . Getting there requires separating growth from impact, finding ways to scale the industry while bending the resource curve downward. “We need to start seeing that graph divide, with impact going down and the growth going up.”

Thinking in Systems, Not Silos

One reason sustainability conversations fall short, Gabriel argued, is that they tend to stay within the boundaries of the sustainability field itself. The forces shaping data center infrastructure today, including geopolitical risk, supply chain scarcity, energy market structures, and community relations, do not respect those boundaries. Addressing them requires a multi-disciplinary approach that borrows from fields with more practice at managing complexity.

“If we were to pick a field that is best at doing this right now, it’s probably risk, and more specifically, if you look at insurance companies, they’re amazing at capturing this because they have so much data and they’re able to crunch it,” he said. Having people from different backgrounds collaborating and communicating is the best path to addressing the extremely complex, interconnected challenges such as power shortages that the industry is facing today.

Heat Reuse: Valuable, but Not Universal

Gabriel leads a heat reuse workstream for the Open Compute Project, so his cautious take on the topic may come as a surprise. The logic of heat reuse is straightforward: nearly all the energy flowing into a data center converts to heat, and using that heat for other purposes rather than dissipating it is sensible in principle. In practice, though, the economics depend heavily on geography and local infrastructure.

District heating networks, common in Germany and other northern European countries, make heat reuse viable at scale. In Spain, where Submer is headquartered, or in the United States, those networks largely do not exist. Trying to mandate heat reuse uniformly across markets will produce uneven and often poor results.

“It might just be 20% of data centers worldwide that are applicable,” Gabriel said. “I think that makes more sense than trying to hit it all and not getting anything.”

He flagged desalination and water treatment as underexamined applications for heat reuse, noting their round-the-clock demand profile. The constraint, again, is proximity: only data centers sited near coastlines or water treatment facilities would benefit. The pattern across all of these examples is the same: broad ambitions need to be matched with specific, locally grounded analysis before they translate into real outcomes.

The Community Dimension

Beyond grid dynamics and thermodynamics, Gabriel emphasized that sustainable infrastructure is also a social proposition, and one that requires the same place-specific thinking. Heat reuse, for all its complexity, offers something rare in the industry: a tangible benefit that local communities can see and understand. Unlike grid flexibility programs or ancillary services markets, a data center supplying heat to a nearby manufacturer or supporting a local business is a concrete value proposition to the people who live nearby.

That matters for the permitting process. “It goes a long way for that regulatory process, the buy-in, the social license to operate,” Gabriel said. Operators who engage communities early, rather than as an afterthought or not at all, tend to move faster through approval and run into fewer delays.  This practice also helps with future projects as a reputation builder. The TechArena Take

Gabriel’s argument is ultimately a call for better engineering of the sustainability problem itself. Sustainability as a vague aspiration produces vague results, if any. Sustainability as a set of specific, locally calibrated initiatives focused on relevant topics  can produce real outcomes. Infrastructure should not be considered in isolation, especially not when it plays such a crucial role for societies. In the race to build data centers, systems and longer-term thinking should be key. To learn more about Submer’s work, watch our full podcast or visit submer.com.