At a glance
- About 350 U.S. data centers hold LEED certification, Elizabeth Beardsley, the council's senior policy counsel, said at the Greenbuild International Conference + Expo in New York.
- For allocators holding data center exposure through funds or co-investment vehicles, the state where a project sits now determines what it must disclose.
- Beardsley said owners and developers "are recognizing that they need to be more transparent," and that a lack of transparency "has hindered their community engagement and backfired in terms of public sentiment."
More than 2,000 data centers worldwide, representing 591 million square feet, were LEED-certified or registered as of September, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.
About 350 U.S. data centers hold LEED certification, Elizabeth Beardsley, the council's senior policy counsel, said at the Greenbuild International Conference + Expo in New York. The global 591-million-square-foot figure counts certified and registered projects together; the U.S. figure counts certified buildings only, so the two numbers are not directly comparable. Construction Dive reported the council's remarks on Oct. 21.
For allocators holding data center exposure through funds or co-investment vehicles, the state where a project sits now determines what it must disclose. Beardsley said four states have building performance disclosure requirements specific to data centers, while other states rely on benchmarking laws, so two comparable projects can operate under different reporting regimes. If community sentiment shapes the approval calendar, as Beardsley argues, the state regime and any negotiated community commitments belong in the development budget allocators are asked to underwrite, not in a sustainability appendix.
Beardsley said owners and developers "are recognizing that they need to be more transparent," and that a lack of transparency "has hindered their community engagement and backfired in terms of public sentiment." An average certified or registered project is roughly 295,000 square feet, suggesting a certification pool weighted toward campus-scale development rather than small edge sites.
The council is working on compliance pathways for data center building performance and launched the Greening AI Data Centers Coalition this year with other organizations to set standards for the sector. It has not said what the standards will require or when they will be published.
The negotiated community benefits are more concrete. Beardsley described agreements in which a developer pays for home energy-efficiency retrofits or includes on-site battery storage that cuts peak energy use while providing backup power to residents. "There [are] different models that are cropping up that I think have a lot of potential, but all those require a lot of coordination from all the different parties — the data center owner and developer, the utility, the community and the jurisdictions," she said.
Beardsley also said polls show residents are more likely to accept data centers powered by renewable or clean energy. For investors whose data center case runs through interconnection and generation rather than floor space, that makes the power contract a siting variable.
Reported by the Infrastructure desk from Construction Dive. Published . Corrections