ECOLAB
For most of the past century, water has been treated as a background input – cheap, local and largely taken for granted. That assumption no longer holds. As data centres scale to meet the demands of AI and cloud computing, the sector is confronting a resource constraint that cannot be engineered away without a deliberate strategy.
Emilio Tenuta, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Ecolab, has spent decades building the case that operational performance and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive. In the context of data centres, he contends that managing water is no longer a matter of compliance. Instead, it is a business imperative and can even be a competitive differentiator.
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Data centre growth is colliding with real resource limits Ecolab operates across virtually every industry, providing water, hygiene, infection prevention and resource management solutions to customers worldwide. Its positioning spans science, data and operational services – meaning it sits close to many of the sector’ s most pressing infrastructure challenges. Emilio’ s role spans that breadth, with sustainability embedded into business strategy rather than treated as a separate function.
Emilio’ s assessment of the data centre sector identifies a clear bottleneck.“ The core challenge is simple,” he says.
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