How Much Sustainability Fits in a Data Centre?: The AI Boom and the Physical Footprint Behind the Cloud - Softcover

Grund, Thorsten

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798187535774

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

You ask an AI model something. It answers in a second. You picture nothing much — maybe a soft white cloud.

The truth weighs thousands of tonnes and never switches off.

Behind every AI answer sits a physical building: windowless, always awake, drawing power with the same stubborn steadiness as a beating heart. This book follows the real infrastructure behind the AI boom — the land sealed for decades, the water no one counts, the lifecycle emissions hidden behind a single operating figure, and how the cost of expanding the power grid actually gets distributed among all of us.

Grounded in Swedish data and extended across the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, the book tracks how three governments have each, independently, arrived at the same conclusion within the space of a year: not a ban on data centres, but a price on the terms of entry. Brussels chose disclosure and efficiency mandates. Westminster chose grid-queue reform and designated growth zones. Dublin replaced four years of ambiguity with a binding, priced condition — an 80 percent renewable-generation requirement matched to actual grid capacity.

The book also looks further afield — to Ireland's own earlier moratorium, the Netherlands' land-use battles, Singapore's strict efficiency ceiling, and Virginia's new consumption tax — before asking the question almost never asked in public: on what terms should this infrastructure be built, and who ultimately bears the cost?

The picture that emerges is neither alarmist nor uncritically positive. Data centres create real economic value. They also strain grids that are already stretched thin, in precisely the places they most want to be built.

The question is rarely whether we should have data centres. We should. The real question — the one almost never discussed in public — is on what terms they get built, and who ends up paying the bill.

Grounded in government data, regulatory decisions, and international research, written for the curious reader rather than the specialist.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798187535774
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 107