Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Today, data lies at the core of modern life. From streaming everybody’s favourite shows to enabling artificial intelligence, nearly every aspect of daily living depends on a vast, unseen network of data centre. Yet, these essential facilities face a pressing challenge — they demand enormous amounts of energy and are often constructed with carbon-intensive, non-renewable materials. To support a sustainable digital future, the next generation of data infrastructure must be designed to be both environmentally responsible and climate-resilient.
In Sweden, a pioneering project is taking a different approach. Working with main contractor and mass timber specialist ByggPartner, EcoDataCenter is aiming to be one of the world’s most sustainable data centres, and they’re the first to build a data centre using wood. By using mass timber supplied by Stora Enso, the company has created a scalable blueprint for a new type of sustainable infrastructure – one that has the potential to redefine the digital age.
Data centres: engines of the modern world
Data centres house the servers that run everything from healthcare and finance to entertainment and e-commerce, and the demand for them is growing rapidly. According to the International Energy Agency, global internet traffic has expanded 25-fold since 2010, and the rise of artificial intelligence will only accelerate this growth.
Traditionally, data centres are built with steel and concrete. Seen as strong and secure materials, and therefore well suited for critical infrastructure projects, they also carry a heavy embodied carbon footprint. While data centres are rightly seen as operationally carbon-intensive, a sustainable approach must address the full life cycle of each centre, and also account for the carbon emissions associated with materials and construction.
“There’s a long tradition of building with CLT in Sweden,” explains John Wernvik, Chief External Relations & Sustainability Officer at EcoDataCenter. “We knew we could draw on that heritage and a strong network of local suppliers. By building in wood instead of steel, we also cut embodied carbon significantly.” John added further.
The city of Falun, Sweden, known for its historical copper mines, has become the site of a bold experiment to do things differently. EcoDataCenter was established in 2014, and in 2019 opened the doors to EcoDataCenter 1: the world’s first large-scale data centre built using cross-laminated timber (CLT), fully powered by renewable energy.
Mass timber: safe by design, sustainable by nature
Mass timber, and particularly CLT, has steadily been growing as a credible alternative to non-renewable materials for large-scale buildings. It can compete on material characteristics, as it is strong and durable, as well as being much lighter, which can often benefit complex sites. CLT-based projects can benefit from high levels of offsite processing, making them much faster than projects that utilise traditional construction methods. The health benefits of wooden buildings for workers are also well documented.
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Tags: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, carbon footprint, CLT, mass timber industry, non-renewable material, Stora Enso, sustainability, sustainable infrastructure, sweden, wood composite material, wood material, wooden data centre, woodworking
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