Data Centres and the City
Grimshaw’s Venice Biennale exhibition looks to the opportunities to integrate Data Centres as Community Assets
Driven by the explosion of the digital economy on the eve of the AI revolution, data centres are, with immense speed and impact, becoming a dominant real estate typology and key city-shaping infrastructure.
They are vital to the future of our societies.
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Given their importance and resource needs, how can we evolve data centres to be more than just essential infrastructure?
Introduction
Driven by the explosion of the digital economy on the eve of the AI revolution, data centres are, with immense speed and impact, becoming a dominant real estate typology and key city-shaping infrastructure. The cloud is a "physical thing", and although data centres bring economic benefits, they can pose problems. Their energy and water needs pose significant challenges during transition towards a net zero carbon world. In some areas, communities have opposed the presence of data centres, seeing them as 'bad neighbours' best located in exurban locations.
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This provides the context for the Grimshaw's exhibition at the 2025 Venice Biennale: working together with Goodman to explore how these agendas can and must come together. The exhibition demonstrates approaches to transforming these essential infrastructure elements from isolated compounds into integrated community assets, building on established urban planning principles to create a framework for data centre-oriented development (DOD).
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The exhibition's key component is a large physical model depicting an urban environment with an integrated data centre. Technical illustrations and video installations complement the physical model, examining practical strategies for infrastructure symbiosis and resource efficiency with technical research support from Arup.
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The exhibition addresses a central challenge: supporting digital infrastructure expansion while meeting environmental obligations, as conventional approaches to data centre development could impede climate action goals.
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Read on to find out more details.
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Our collective data footprint
If you spend just one minute online today, you helped create about 6000 terabytes of fresh data. roughly as much as the entire web held back in 1995.
Stream a video, scroll your socials, ask an AI a question: every click, swipe and prompt piles on a little more.
With four billion people checking a Meta-owned service each month three out of five people online use Meta-owned services daily.
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Industry analysts reckon we’ll be sitting on 170 zettabytes by 2025—double the volume of only four years ago, fueled by AI data generation.
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One zettabyte is equal to one sextillion bytes or (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 the size of 100 billion movies.
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​​​Keeping pace means building big. We passed the 1,000-hyperscale-data-centre mark in 2024, and the count is expected to double again before the decade’s out. Each of these facilities can use 100 megawatts: enough electricity to power 170 000 homes or a city the size of Venice.
And depending on climate the most energy efficient way to cool the data centre is by using water.
A single campus can use the annual potable-water budget of 8,000 Sydney households simply to condense that waste heat.
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The cloud is a physical thing
Talk to most people about “the cloud” and they picture something wispy, floating somewhere over the horizon. In truth it’s a forest of very solid buildings: window-less sheds the size of a Costco warehouse—about 14,000 m² on average—stacked floor-to-ceiling with servers.
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Speed dictates their address. Because every 200 km of fibre adds about a millisecond of delay, hyperscale operators park these buildings on the urban fringe, close to users and backbone cables. That proximity plugs them straight into city power and water grids—and turns their physical footprint into everyone’s business.
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Demand shows no sign of slowing. As companies shift more data off-site and AI workloads explode, we meet a digital form of Jevons Paradox: greater efficiency lowers the cost per computation, so we simply compute more.
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Our case study looks to address the proliferation of data centres in our cities sustainably, ​
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The ‘cloud’ is not so ephemeral
It has a physical space and an environmental impact
The Vision
Our master-plan vision aims to flip the status quo: instead of hiding a data centre on the edge of town, it can become the catalyst of a mixed-use renewal precinct—next to homes, studios, shops and even an urban farm. Close quarters aren’t a liability; they’re the key that lets resources circulate instead of being wasted.
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With everything within easy reach, local infrastructure loops can be built to reduce waste. Server waste-heat runs straight into a district-heating main that warms apartments and a public pool. A recycled-water loop tops up cooling towers, irrigates the park and cuts demand on the potable grid. Rooftop solar, batteries and the centre’s own back-up plant mesh into a local micro-grid, sharing clean power and shaving peaks for the wider network. The pedestrian spine tying it all together doubles as a shaded meeting place—part social hub, part green lung.
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Placing the data centre at the core also changes the story we tell about it. Making the building a visible ally rather than a silent neighbour. The result is a precinct that proves digital infrastructure that can contribute with heat, water and energy—showing how the next crop of data centres can help cities hit their climate goals instead of holding them back.
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A Water Centre handles recycled-water treatment; its façade doubles as an educational exhibit on circular hydrology.
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An adjoining Energy Centre facilitates the balancing of critical and non-critical loads across the precinct, eradicating the need for carbon-intensive, diesel-powered backup generators.
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Light-industrial buildings at ground give local food producers and clean industry uses quick access to low-cost process heat.
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A Research & Innovation hub sits within walking distance of the servers it studies, cutting latency for prototype AI and edge-computing projects.
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New residential buildings line a shaded pedestrian spine activated by cafés, street retail and pocket parks.
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A riverside Sports & Leisure cluster—pool, gym and playing courts—runs on captured server heat, while an evening-focused Entertainment district anchors the opposite edge.
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A small Public Centre (library + civic hall) completes the social heart of the precinct.
Infrastructure - Heat
Every watt of electricity that the servers consume ends up as heat.
By capturing that energy and using the Energy Centre’s heat-pump we can harness and increase the temperature to a useful 60 °C and connect to precinct loop that traces the master-plan like an artery.
The more heat dependent uses are located closest to the source, like the sports-and-leisure cluster, where the pool hall and training courts run year-round on recovered warmth that would otherwise waste into the atmosphere. Farther along, branch lines slip into the light-industrial uses, letting a craft brewery, an urban farm and a small plastics-recycling studio draw process heat without firing a single boiler.
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Any surplus rides the same loop into plate exchangers beneath the new residential mid-rises, pre-heating domestic hot-water tanks and trimming household energy bills.
One closed system, three temperature tiers, zero waste—turning yesterday’s thermal liability into the precinct’s everyday comfort.
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Infrastructure - Water
Everything starts with rain. Site wide runoff streams into green roofs and stepped bio-swales that line the pedestrian spine; plaza drains steer stormwater to underground retention tanks sized for a 1-in-100-year event.
Inside the Water Centre, this harvest is filtered, UV-sterilised and remineralised so a portion can meet full potable standards—topping up drinking fountains, cafés and household kitchens—while the balance feeds the evaporative leg of the data-hall cooling system.
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Domestic wastewater completes the picture. A membrane-bioreactor in the same plant strips out solids and pathogens, blending the reclaimed effluent with surplus rainwater to create a constant “purple-pipe” supply.
That lilac line shown in the diagrams, follows the heat main through the precinct: it keeps the pool topped up, washes brewery tanks, irrigates rooftop gardens and flushes every toilet in the new residential towers.
By combining stormwater capture with on-site recycling, the precinct trims its demand on the municipal potable grid by up to 80 percent.
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The loop closes on itself. Warm return water from the heat network stabilises temperatures in the treatment beds, discouraging Legionella, while the now-cool, polished water heads back to the servers for another shift at heat-removal duty. One integrated cycle—storm to server to sidewalk garden—turns what used to be a linear drain on resources into a resilient, precinct-scale water economy.
Infrastructure - Energy
The precinct’s power network is organised as a self-balancing micro-grid, its flows mapped in the diagram by the yellow, bi-directional traces that radiate from the Energy Centre. Daytime demand is met first by a precinct and wider rooftop and façade PV coverage. Surplus solar charges battery stacks inside the Energy Centre; at dusk that stored power takes the evening peak, with any residual dispatched to the state grid through a bidirectional intertie that also guarantees resilience during rare shortfalls.
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Two substations within the precinct grid provide power to both the data centre and local community. The data centre is given priority over non-critical loads across the precinct in the rare event of an emergency, enabling the use of highly polluting diesel generators, both within the data centre and across the precinct, to be eliminated.
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Circularity extends to waste, too. All food scraps, green cuttings and spent grain from the craft brewery funnel to a Bio-Resource Hub on the south edge of the site. There, anaerobic digesters convert organics into biogas, which is scrubbed and fired in a high-efficiency combined-heat-and-power engine. The electricity feeds straight into the same micro-grid, while the jacket heat is lifted to 60 °C and injected into the precinct loop that already carries recovered server heat.
Even the digester residue finds purpose, returning as fertiliser for the rooftop gardens and urban farm plots. In this closed-loop arrangement—sun to silicon, waste to watts, electrons shared rather than shed—energy becomes another currency that circulates rather than a commodity that drains away, completing the symbiosis outlined throughout the master-plan.
Community & Economic Integration
This diagram condenses our big idea into three coloured loops—energy, water and heat—but the real story is how those loops knit the precinct into its wider neighbourhood.
A data centre already demands heavy-duty kit: resilient power feeds, water treatment, fibre backbones. By landing that investment in a mixed-use precinct rather than a an isolated structure outside of town, we turn the infrastructure into a shared community use reducing waste. The micro-grid that stabilises server racks now buffers apartment energy peaks; the rain-and-waste-water plant that cools processors also supplies purple-pipe irrigation for street trees; the fibre ring that hustles AI models between GPUs gives local start-ups the latency edge they could never afford alone. The centre acts as anchor tenant and, in effect, supports a level of service the district would otherwise struggle to finance.
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Resource flows follow the same logic. Warm water that once drifted off in steam is captured at the Energy Centre, piped to the pool, the brewery and the greenhouse roofs—shaving both carbon and operating costs. Stormwater harvested across the site is polished into process water, then flushed through cooling coils, toilets and drip lines before returning for another run. Couple those thermal and hydraulic loops with rooftop-solar electrons moving through the battery stack and you have a precinct where nothing valuable leaves the gate; it just shifts purpose.
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Those hard numbers show up in softer outcomes. Reliable low-carbon utilities unlock new workshops and research labs, public spending saved on pipes is re-directed into playgrounds and shaded plazas, and a once anonymous grey box becomes a visible proof-point that high tech can serve local life.
When a data centre stands shoulder-to-shoulder with homes, cafés and sports grounds—feeding them rather than draining them—it stops being an off-limits utility and starts reading as part of the community’s own toolkit for resilience and growth.
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Synergies & Metrics
When the data-centre loops plug straight into the precinct, resource maths flips. Waste heat that used to bleed into the sky now warms apartments, greenhouses and a year-round pool; storm- and wastewater flow through a single treatment train that serves both cooling towers and street trees. One set of pipes, many jobs.
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If the same mix of housing, sports facilities and light-industrial workshops were built without tapping the data-centre loops, its boilers and chillers would draw roughly 70 % more grid energy than our integrated scheme. All of that saving sits outside the data centre’s fence line—it’s the wider precinct that wins big by riding on recovered heat and shared renewables.
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Inside the data centre halls, gains are smaller but still real. On-site solar and battery support shave peaks, while switching the cooling towers to recycled process water trims pumping and treatment loads. Together those tweaks cut the data centre’s own energy use by about 3 % against a conventional hyperscale baseline. Add it up and the result is a neighbourhood that lives lighter on the grid because it shares an address with a data centre, not in spite of it.
Strategies for Symbiosis: A Deeper Dive
It is important to note that there are technical and feasibility challenges to the viability of a precinct operating with as many receptors as those noted in this diagram. Many approaches outlined are a large deviation from Data Centre operators' typical requirements and we expect would a require a bold Data Centre Operator with an aligned sustainability agenda to adopt this approach. Cost and Embodied Carbon considerations have not been considered in the presentation of systems.
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The diagram is intended to showcase the multitude of potential community benefits a data centre could offer. The diagram is indicative only and it should be noted that these may not all be achievable at one time depending on multiple parameters including precinct location and climate.
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It is also important to note that location itself has a significant influence on the opportunities for synergies a data centre can offer when implemented as part of a wider precinct development. In the high and low latitude locations, which present a heating driving climate, heat offtake opportunities are significantly greater. Noting waste heat export to a municipal heat network is the main area where a data centre can offer the most value at a basic level.
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In cooling driven climates, for example Sydney where this diagram is based on, the heat offtake opportunity is reduced, however the likelihood of water scarcity is greater, opening a different set of opportunities.
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To this end, it should also be noted that some of the opportunities presented are competing against one another. For example, the more heat that is exported from a data centre facility, the less cooling is required at that site and therefore the lower the water consumption. On the flipside, when heat demand is lower and less heat is exported, more water is needed to cool the facility and a greater case for recycled water facilities is created. In the interest of simplicity, the diagram has not attempted to explain these competing technologies, but rather capture both in a theoretical manner
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*Given the global trends being witnessed around exponential data centre development, and in order to accurately reflect the opportunities a data centre could offer a precinct in Sydney, we have based calculations on the premise that the data centre would be built regardless, whether that was within the precinct or standalone/separate to it, and therefore carbon and water savings for the whole precinct are demonstrated as a percentage excluding the IT load of the data centre itself. The intention is to highlight the community benefit that a data centre can bring at a precinct level, without these numbers being diminished by the typically much greater utilities demand of the data centre itself – the demand for data centre development and inevitability of their construction we believe support this decision.
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*Carbon factors have been based on ‘New South Wales Government Greenhouse Gas emission factors’ and offtake / system load numbers have been arrived at using Arup’s professional experience and widely accepted industry rules of thumb.
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​https://www.arup.com/markets/data-centres/
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Collaborators:
Goodman Group
Is a financial supporter and provided the case study site. Goodman is a provider of essential infrastructure. That own, develop and manage high quality, sustainable logistics properties and data centres in major global cities, that are critical to the digital economy.
Arup
Technical support and advise. Arup is global consultancy with advisory and technical expertise across more than 150 disciplines.