Concerns about the environmental impact of data centres have been popping across Canada almost as quickly as the data centres themselves. But what if there was a way to start lowering those emissions even before a facility is turned on? According to two cleantech advocates, greening the data centre boom starts with the buildings, and the huge amounts of concrete used to create them.
Concrete is responsible for roughly eight percent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to a study by Chatham House. Those emissions come primarily from the process of refining cement, the binding agent used in concrete. Traditional cement is created through a combustion process that both directly releases CO2 into the atmosphere and relies heavily on fossil fuels throughout manufacturing.
“If we’re looking at the concrete and steel that’s going to go into this project, we’re looking at somewhere between 218,000 and 263,000 tonnes of CO2.”
Gil Yaron, Light House
Data centres use a lot of concrete. According to Gil Yaron, the managing director of circular innovation at Light House, a Vancouver-based non-profit supporting regenerative building practices, Meta’s Sturgeon County data centre is predicted to require as much as 1.5 million cubic metres of concrete. That’s roughly the equivalent of 37 CN Towers.
Far from just an enormous physical footprint, that translates into a lot of emissions, according to Yaron.
“If we’re looking at the concrete and steel that’s going to go into this project, we’re looking at somewhere between 218,000 and 263,000 tonnes of CO2,” Yaron said.
The emissions Yaron is talking about are called embodied emissions. The term refers to the total greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) generated during the lifecycle of a building material like concrete or steel. To put the Meta project’s embodied emissions into perspective, they are the equivalent of the GHG produced by anywhere from 95,000 to 115,000 homes each year, according to the Government of Canada’s emissions equivalencies calculator.
An opportunity in wolf’s clothing
While projects like Meta’s or Bell’s Saskatchewan hyperscaler no doubt carry significant environmental footprints, some climate advocates see the facilities as an opportunity to strengthen the market for low-carbon concrete.
Low-carbon concrete uses cement developed through alternative means to the traditional, emissions-heavy combustion method. Companies like Calgary’s Cura Climate use an electrochemical process on the limestone (a key ingredient in cement) to reduce fossil fuel consumption and filter out the raw CO2. Cura has claimed its tech can reduce emissions by anywhere from 30 to 85 percent.
Genevieve Sherman is the CEO of the US-based Concrete Transition Capital (CTC), a private climate tech and financial services platform founded in 2025. CTC focuses on financing organizations that decarbonize the global cement and concrete industry. Sherman said that data centres in the US, with their vast need for concrete, are looking to the low-carbon concrete sector as a way to meet sustainability targets and scale back their footprint.
“Companies like Amazon have released entire protocols that say that [low-carbon concrete] is ideal,” Sherman said. “The hyperscalers are by far the most inquisitive companies. They know about innovative technologies, and they are buying bucketfuls at a time and pouring a slab on the ground and testing it.”
That hasn’t necessarily translated into widespread use. At least not north of the border. According to Erin Bobicki, the CEO and co-founder of Cura Climate, low-carbon concrete is very much still a niche product, and pricing can be a make-it-or-break-it decision for hyperscalers here in Canada.
“We hear a lot about low-carbon demand from data centres when talking to project managers,” Bobicki said. “But what they’ve told us is that while they specify low carbon in their projects, it often comes down to costs and right now, they’re not able to source the quantity they need at a cost that is acceptable to the data centre builders.”
That bottleneck is something both Sherman and Yaron acknowledge, telling BetaKit in an interview that a wider demand globally would help move the product from specialty service to status quo.
“We need that demand signal to be so big, because right now it’s tenuous,” Sherman said. “It puts [the traditional concrete industry] in a position to say ‘this is niche; this is a special product, and we’re going to sell it at a massive premium.’”
From signal to wider adoption
Swapping concrete types won’t magically remove the environmental impact associated with data centres, and it does nothing to address concerns around grid stability, water usage, or the gas-fired power plants being planned as alternative fuel sources for these industrial behemoths. That’s why both Yaron and Sherman see data centres as more of a jumping-off point for the low-carbon concrete market than a sustainable customer base.
“Really, it is a very small piece of the equation, despite the actual footprint of these individual facilities overall,” Yaron said. “We really should be looking at all of our infrastructure in terms of how we build, what we build with, and what we build.”
RELATED: Cura raises $10 million USD to scale low-carbon cement technology
Yaron said there is a growing movement from developers around micro-scale data centres, which, if widely adopted, would cut off low-carbon concrete demand from data centres at the knees.
“A lot of companies are innovating in this space, like Green Edge Compute Corp in Victoria. Armada is another, and even Nvidia, the largest player in the data centre sector in the world, is looking at developing microscale data centre models,” he said.
Instead, Sherman and Yaron believe all three orders of government are needed to truly give the low-carbon concrete startups some wind in their sails.
“They have a huge role to play. I cannot emphasize this enough. [Governments] are the biggest buyers of [concrete] and they regulate its use in the built environment,” Sherman said. “Data centres are very visible, and they do matter, but in our opinion what makes them special is their willingness to pay a premium for green materials. In terms of total demand, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon combined use far less of this material than the combined purchasing power of Canadian provinces.”
“What we want to see is that the province [a data centre] is located in is going to [start using low-carbon concrete] for their sidewalks, roads, bridges, infrastructure,” she added.
BetaKit’s Prairies reporting is funded in part by YEGAF, a not-for-profit dedicated to amplifying business stories in Alberta.
Feature image courtesy of Concrete Transition Capital.
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