Design for circularity - a data centre equipment case study

Abstract Data centres house equipment that processes and stores digital information and consequently the data centre industry provides essential services to all users of digital technology around the world. The sector has grown very rapidly since the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1989 and by 2025 68% of the global population had access to the internet. The introduction and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fuelling further considerable expansion of the data centre industry along with increasing demand for resources including energy, water, land and materials. To date the design of data centre equipment has focused on the use phase with little or no consideration of what happens to equipment at end-of-life and consequently, millions of tonnes of valuable resources are being wasted. New AI-enabled products are already being designed and manufactured and there is an increasingly urgent need to incentivise change and move from linear to circular design to increase resource efficiency, ensure supply chain security and increase data centre sustainability. This article presents a case study of a prototype circular server to demonstrate the benefits of products that enable straightforward product life extension and increase recycling and materials reclamation at end-of-life. The environmental impacts of the circular server are then quantified and compared with those of a ‘standard’ non-circular server. The results illustrate that across various life cycle scenarios and time periods the impact of the circular server is consistently lower than that of a standard server which supports change in design strategies in the data centre industry.