4 Ways You Can Build Sustainable AI Data Centres with Data Sovereignty

The following priorities are crucial for supporting data centre growth in Canada while accounting for electricity, environment and governance factors.

For Canadian organizations, local data centre capacity is critical. Hosting AI workloads domestically reduces latency, improves performance and ensures compliance with data residency requirements.

It also strengthens Canada’s ability to commercialize AI research and extend adoption beyond large enterprises to SMEs, which collectively account for roughly half of Canadian GDP.

Power availability is emerging as one of the biggest constraints on data centre growth. In AI-driven data centres, infrastructure consumption increasingly translates into tokens generated. Each AI inference or training cycle produces tokens and behind every token lies a measurable cost in compute, power, cooling and supporting infrastructure.

This makes energy efficiency a business imperative. Data centre designs must account for energy efficiency and optimal resource management to combat energy shortfalls.

Beyond electricity consumption, data centres contribute to environmental impact through cooling systems, water usage and e‑waste. Traditional air‑cooled environments struggle to keep up with modern AI hardware, often requiring disproportionate energy for cooling.

Industry research shows that direct liquid cooling can deliver significantly higher cooling efficiency and lower energy consumption than air cooling. In some scenarios, liquid cooling can reduce cooling energy use while enabling much higher rack densities.

These efficiencies are critical if Canada is to scale its AI infrastructure without materially increasing emissions.

Data sovereignty is a strategic priority for Canada. Keeping sensitive data within national borders helps ensure compliance with privacy regulations, protects intellectual property and reduces exposure to foreign jurisdictional risks.

For regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, energy and government, sovereign data centres are essential to maintaining trust and operational resilience.

The following strategies can help Canadian organizations as they build data centre capacity for AI workloads, to meet key power, cooling and resource management priorities.

Data centres are complex environments where compute, power, cooling and space utilization are deeply interconnected. The first and most critical step toward sustainability is measurement.

As the common principle goes, organizations can only control what they can measure.

Many data centres operate with limited visibility into how energy is consumed across IT equipment, cooling infrastructure and supporting systems.

This lack of transparency makes it difficult to identify inefficiencies, pinpoint energy waste or confidently prioritize investments that deliver both cost and environmental benefits.

The goal is to establish a clear, data-driven baseline of energy performance and operational efficiency. This involves tracking key metrics such as:

• Power usage effectiveness (PUE): Measures how efficiently a data centre uses energy by comparing total facility energy to the energy consumed by IT equipment
• Energy reuse effectiveness (ERE): Indicates how effectively a data centre reuses waste energy by accounting for energy recovered and beneficially used
• Carbon usage effectiveness (CUE): Measures the carbon emissions produced per unit of IT energy consumed
• Cooling efficiency ratio (CER): Assesses the efficiency of cooling by comparing the amount of heat removed to the energy consumed by the cooling system

With these insights, organizations can distinguish areas of strong performance from those requiring intervention and plan both short-term optimizations and longer-term upgrades.

Our partners at Dell offer solutions for strengthening data centre energy consumption visibility through integrated management tools.

Dell’s iDRAC and OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager provide granular, real-time insights into server health, power consumption and thermal behaviour. These tools enable operators to:

• Monitor energy use at a fine-grained level
• Correlate workload demand with power and cooling requirements
• Respond proactively to emerging inefficiencies

In addition, Dell AIOps extends observability beyond individual components to provide a holistic view of data centre operations.

By correlating telemetry across compute, storage, networking and cooling, Dell AIOps helps operators optimize power and cooling behaviour proactively. This level of observability enables data centre teams to move from reactive monitoring to predictive operations while supporting the scale and complexity of AI-driven workloads.

Energy efficiency is not only about how much power a data centre consumes, but how effectively that power is converted into useful compute work.

Subpar resource utilization is one of the most common sources of waste in modern data centres.

Underutilized servers, overprovisioned cooling, idle capacity reserved for peak demand and inefficient airflow design all contribute to superfluous energy consumption.

In AI-ready environments, these inefficiencies are magnified as high-density hardware generates significantly more heat, often pushing traditional cooling systems beyond their optimal operating range.

The main task at hand for organizations is to maximize utilization of compute, power and cooling resources in a data centre while minimizing waste.

This can be broken down into the following actions:

• Aligning infrastructure capacity with real workload demand
• Increasing rack density where appropriate
• Deploying cooling systems that scale efficiently with heat loads

Effective resource management ensures that energy is consumed where it creates business value.

Our partners at Lenovo and Dell offer targeted cooling solutions that can help data centres improve resource utilization and reduce cooling energy needs.

Lenovo’s Nepture water cooling system is purpose-built for high-density AI and HPC workloads, enabling direct liquid cooling that removes heat with greater energy efficiency.

By capturing heat at the source, Neptune allows data centres to support denser configurations with lower overall energy consumption and reduced reliance on power-hungry cooling systems. The technology brings the following benefits to a data centre:

• Highly efficient heat removal: Removes up to 100 percent of heat directly from components such as CPUs and GPUs, improving the CER metrics for the data centre.
• Lower energy use and operational costs: Reduces data centre energy significantly, making them well-suited for high-density AI and HPC workloads where cooling demand is a major operational cost driver.
• Aligned with sustainability goals: Warm-water liquid cooling reduces reliance on chilled water systems and air handlers, supporting lower emissions.

In environments where full liquid cooling is not practical, Dell’s advanced air and hybrid cooling solutions can revitalize energy efficiency.

Direct‑to‑chip liquid cooling is complemented by the Dell PowerCool Enclosed Rear Door Heat Exchanger (eRDHx), which adds a smart, adaptive airflow system to support diverse data‑center layouts.

Together, these technologies provide a flexible hybrid cooling approach combining air and liquid methods. This duo can help to efficiently manage varying thermal loads and accommodate evolving infrastructure requirements.

The solution offers the following benefits to high-density data centres:

• Reduction in cooling energy use: Delivers up to about 60 percent reduction in cooling energy costs compared with traditional methods by capturing IT-generated heat and operating with warmer facility water.
• Higher rack density without extra power: Organizations can deploy more racks of dense compute without increasing overall power draw, helping data centres achieve higher utilization at lower energy cost.
• Flexible cooling options: Beyond eRDHx, Dell offers both direct liquid and air cooling strategies tailored to the data centre’s workload and density needs.

Built keeping AI and HPC workloads in mind, HPE’s DLC solution uses liquid circulated through cold plates for extracting heat directly from CPUs, GPUs, memory and network components.

The design uses a fanless architecture, which enables significantly higher power densities and efficiency. It also provides data centres with reduced cooling energy consumption, carbon footprint and noise.

• End‑to‑end component coverage: Liquid cooling extends beyond CPUs/GPUs to memory modules, networking fabrics, storage and power rectifiers, ensuring full-system heat extraction without fans.
• Two‑stage isolation cooling loop: The DLC method simplifies the cooling process by creating a loop between facility water and server coolant, which improves safety and reliability.
• Fit for high-density environments: Offers significant rack space, energy and carbon savings by eliminating the need to use physical fans for heat removal.  

Demand for AI and data-driven workloads rarely grows in a straight line. Organizations often experience bursts of demand tied to model training, pilots or seasonal business cycles.

Traditional capital-intensive infrastructure models encourage overprovisioning to meet future needs, resulting in idle capacity that still consumes power and cooling resources.

This stranded capacity increases costs and undermines sustainability goals.

The core need is to align infrastructure consumption more closely with actual demand while maintaining control over data residency. To put this in perspective, organizations must aim to:

• Decouple infrastructure capacity from fixed ownership
• Enable more ways to right-size consumption
• Comply with data residency regulations while balancing capacity

Flexible consumption models allow organizations to scale capacity up or down as needed, reducing idle infrastructure and improving overall utilization.

Our partners at HPE offer GreenLake and asset lifecycle management offerings to meet data centre capacity needs.

HPE’s GreenLake platform delivers a cloud-like, consumption-based experience for on-premises data centre infrastructure. With GreenLake, organizations deploy compute, storage and networking on their own premises including sovereign data centres but pay only for the capacity they actually use.

This model offers the following key advantages:

• Avoid over-provisioning of assets by supplementing on-demand capacity when needed
• Reduce idle energy draw, as capacity can be scaled down when not in use
• Align infrastructure spend with actual demand for AI and enterprise workloads

Additionally, HPE Financial Services (HPE FS) for IT asset management complements GreenLake by providing flexible financing, asset lifecycle management and sustainability-oriented services.

HPE FS helps organizations track, manage and optimize their data centre hardware over its full lifecycle from acquisition and deployment to refurbishment or responsible end-of-life management.

Building a sustainable and sovereign data centre is as much of a technology challenge as it is an operational one.

Organizations often struggle to balance sustainability objectives with performance requirements, regulatory constraints and evolving workload needs. Fragmented procurement and design approaches can lead to suboptimal outcomes, even when individual components are efficient.

As organizations plan to integrate energy-efficient technologies and rethink how their data centre operates today, they need field experts to guide decision-making. Here are three things to look for in a data centre solutions provider:

• Look for experts who are well-versed with local Canadian regulations around data centre design, electrification and data residency
• Look for full-lifecycle vendor partners who can facilitate from sourcing to deployment
• Look for design partners who have implemented similar-scale data centre projects in Canada before

Solution partners such as CDW Canada play a critical role in helping organizations design, source and deploy data centre infrastructure that meets sustainability, performance and sovereignty goals.

CDW is deeply integrated in the data centre ecosystem, facilitating three core aspects of data centre modernization, as described below.

• Expertise: In-house pool of solution architects and data centre design experts who can plan how to modernize existing setups or build new ones while abiding by energy standards and jurisdictions
• Partner technology: Industry-leading partnerships with modern solution providers including HPE, Dell and Lenovo, enabling best-fit implementation for data centre projects
• End-to-end fulfillment: Facilitate the entire fulfillment process from RFP to procurement, ensuring organizations can meet their needs under one roof

By bringing together the right technologies across the board, partnering with CDW can help reduce design complexity and ensure solutions are optimized end to end.