Aussie toilet water will soon cool data centres

The architecture firm behind some of the nation’s largest and most modern data centres is flush with innovative ideas to address issues posed by energy-hungry and water-reliant facilities.

Data centres typically use a lot of water in cooling processes.

The architecture firm behind some of the nation’s largest and most modern data centres is developing the capability to use toilet water to cool them.

HDR is in the midst of designing a data centre, due for completion in late 2026, that will use wastewater to cool it, including in liquid-to-chip cooling arrangements.

The move would be the first time an Australian data centre had used wastewater in a cooling system, and shows the great lengths developers and architects are going to in the search for solutions to supply issues posed by the energy and water-hungry facilities.

“We’re looking at sewer mining and stormwater harvesting with a number of clients, and that basically just takes pressure off using portable water,” said HDR associate director Samuel Faigen.

The firm took inspiration from a golf course in Sydney’s north, where millions of litres of water a day are treated to water the course.

“You can get a lot of water out of it … it’s surprising,” Mr Faigen said.

“The first use of sewer mining, I think, was in the Pennant Hills Golf Course and that infrastructure investment was a couple of million dollars, which is not a lot in these kind of terms, and from a 30cm sewer pipe, they can pull a million litres of water a day.”

HDR architecture is in the midst of designing a data centre, due for completion in late 2026, that will use wastewater to cool it.

Data centre developers needed to think carefully about their water sources, as some cooling systems had limits to how many times water could be cycled around, Mr Faigen said.

HDR, which has designed data centres for NextDC and Goodman Group, was not able to share which company it was designing the wastewater cooling system for.

The drive to design more water-efficient data centres was just one of several changes to arrive in the rapidly growing and expanding market.

As data grows at exponential rates amid the artificial intelligence boom, data centre developers and operators were going to great lengths to build new-age ‘hotels for computers’.

One big focus was on the design of the centres, which had resulted in the traditionally modest facilities increasingly becoming modern, mixed-use facilities.

Mixed-used developments with retail and hospitality services alongside data centres were on the rise as some developers looked to build data centres closer to urban centres in areas where there was additional power capacity.

“We’re putting cafes and retail public plazas and all sorts of other things in and around our data centres, depending on where they are, which helps them be more than data centres; they become valuable pieces of digital infrastructure,” Mr Faigen said, and highlighted NextDC’s M2 data centre in Tullamarine, about 19km from the Melbourne CBD.

“That has a large and fairly architecturally impressive mission-critical office at the front,” he said.

“NextDC’s M3 has a community cafe at the front of it, and it was recently short-listed for the World Architecture Festival Awards for best use of colour.”

Architects were also going to great lengths to get approvals across the line, and in some cases were designing data centres that would have more community-friendly designs on sides that faced residential areas and housing.

In some cases, data centres looked like completely different buildings, depending on which sides you were standing on, Mr Faigen said.