Photo credit: panumas nikhomkhai / Shutterstock
Nonprofit investment firm Elemental Impact is teaming up with large tech companies to provide late-stage tech innovations “front door access” to data center deployments.
Elemental, with the buy-in of Google, Meta, and Microsoft, today announced the creation of the Data Center Innovation Initiative, a membership-based program focused on piloting and scaling sustainability technologies in and around data centers. The tech companies will pay annual membership fees to cover the operating costs of the initiative. They have already worked with Elemental to scope technology priorities and structure the effort, and will help evaluate and deploy solutions going forward.
Through DCII, Elemental Impact will invest between $500,000 and $5 million per project in up to 10 technology startups through 2027, with a focus on sectors including energy, materials, water, and circularity. The program will source technologies, fund and support pilots inside data centers, and then distribute technology roadmaps and resulting insights among its members.
Data centers are already piloting promising technologies, according to Microsoft’s head of sustainability Melanie Nakagawa, but they’ve been hard to scale. “We see a bit of a struggle to move from pilot to large-scale deployment,” Nakagawa told Latitude Media. “Companies pilot new technologies individually, but have limited bandwidth…compared to the agility of an accelerator.”
