Data Centre LIVE: Verne CEO AI Fireside Chat
In a keynote packed with clarity and urgency, Dominic Ward, CEO of Verne Global, took to the stage to examine the environmental challenge facing the data centre industry, particularly as demand surges from AI workloads.
Speaking at Data Centre Live 2025, Dominic set out a four-pillar roadmap for balancing industry growth with environmental responsibility: location, design, power and transparency.
The carbon cost of data centre growth
Dominic opened with a stark warning – data centre emissions are on track to double by 2030.
“That would put us on par with the carbon footprint of Germany,” he said, noting that the industry is already emitting CO₂ equivalent to that of France.
With 5 billion people online and data volumes doubling every few years, the sector’s energy demands are soaring. The rise of AI has only exacerbated the trend, particularly in the United States, where gas turbines are increasingly being added to meet demand.
“We’re seeing emission growth while most countries are reducing theirs,” he said.
He described this trajectory as unsustainable – unless the industry embraces deep operational change.
Four pillars for sustainable data centre evolution
Dominic’s strategy is built around four principles:
Location: Most data and applications don’t need to sit close to end-users.
“AI training is power-intensive but not latency sensitive – it doesn’t need to run in London or Frankfurt,” he said. Verne encourages clients to “move data, not power” by shifting workloads to lower-carbon regions like the Nordics, where renewable energy is abundant.
Design: Infrastructure must continuously adapt. Older sites aren’t fit for AI-era demands, especially those involving GPU-accelerated computing. Verne has seen compute density rise from 10kW to over 45kW per rack in recent years, with 120kW and even 600kW per rack solutions emerging.
“We’re about to shift from air-cooled to liquid-cooled infrastructure,” Dominic said. “That’s a fundamental redesign moment.”
Power: Using low-carbon and renewable energy is key.
“A megawatt of compute in the UK emits the same as 280 homes,” he explained. “In Iceland, it’s equivalent to just five homes.”
He urged operators to prioritise hydro, geothermal and wind power, recognising limitations around scalability and location, but arguing for smarter placement of workloads.
Transparency: Dominic was blunt about the industry’s continued greenwashing.
“We must move from vague claims to verifiable environmental impact data,” he said.
Verne advocates for stricter sustainability reporting and believes the industry must lead by example – even if political narratives (especially in the US) are deprioritising green agendas.
Innovation, power demand and liquid cooling
In the second half of the talk, Dominic unpacked how AI is reshaping the infrastructure stack. He traced the evolution from early HPC workloads to today’s LLMs and highlighted the industry-wide shift from air cooling to immersion and direct liquid cooling.
“We’re talking about racks that go from 45kW to 120kW in 12 months,” he said, citing Nvidia’s roadmap for 600kW per rack by 2027.
This leap, he argued, demands immediate reinvention.
“Much of the current infrastructure isn’t ready for what’s coming,” he said. “From chip parallelism to rack-level design, we’re being forced to innovate in real time.”
Asked why immersion cooling hasn’t been widely adopted yet, Dominic pointed to hardware warranties.
“Manufacturers are cautious about liquid exposure. Sealing and certifying for new environments takes time.”
Onsite power generation and the nuclear question
Dominic also tackled the future of energy sourcing. With grid constraints and rising demand, some operators are turning to on-site gas turbines.
“It’s already happening in Texas and Ireland,” he warned. While acknowledging this may be a short-term necessity, he cautioned against seeing it as a viable long-term model.
Instead, he sees nuclear – particularly small modular reactors (SMRs) – as a key part of the long-term energy mix.
“We’re probably five to 10 years away from mainstream deployment, but it’s coming,” he said, referencing Microsoft’s acquisition of the Three Mile Island site.
Still, Dominic was clear that today’s priority must be using renewables wherever possible.
“Solar, wind and hydro must be our default, gas is not a sustainable future,” he said.
Urgency, scale and accountability
Dominic closed with a call for realism and boldness. The industry must scale sustainably without falling into greenwash.
“We will be one of the biggest drivers of missed climate targets if we get this wrong,” he said.
His core message – reinvent location, redesign infrastructure, source responsibly, and disclose transparently.
“It’s not about slowing down. It’s about scaling up smarter,” he concluded.
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