Underground data centers enhance sustainability by integrating renewable energy and agriculture
Data centers aren’t going anywhere. They’re the backbone of our digital world, and demand is only climbing. But the way we build and power them? That has to change. Fast. Right now, most data centers are energy-hungry, land-intensive, and fundamentally disconnected from the broader ecosystem. That’s inefficient. The smarter path forward is integration, vertical, spatial, and energetic.
Placing data centers underground isn’t just possible, it’s already practical. You gain natural cooling from the earth itself. It reduces the need for heavy-duty air conditioning, which cuts down on electricity use and extends the life of your hardware. It’s more stable, physically secure, and less affected by environmental risks like floods or fires. And you free up the surface for other uses.
Now imagine this: on top of that same land, you install agrovoltaics, solar panels that also allow crops to grow beneath them. This isn’t just stacking functions. It’s about creating value on every square meter of land. You get clean energy and you get food production, on the same footprint. It’s efficient, resilient, and scalable.
Hiran Daluwatta, Founder and CEO of Noteworthy Global, has been pushing this idea forward. He sees the convergence of tech, agriculture, and energy not as three separate verticals, but as components of one system, what he calls a Sustainable Integrated Data Farm. It’s not some 10-year moonshot. It’s something a country could deploy right now to help hit its climate goals, build strong local infrastructure, and make the digital economy more resilient.
For executives thinking ahead, especially in markets where land usage, heat stress, or disconnected infrastructure are rising concerns, this isn’t just a sustainability play. It’s a business advantage. It removes conflict over land use, it brings digital and agricultural productivity together, and it puts your energy planning on a foundation that’s stable, clean, and increasingly independent from aging grid systems.
Long story short: if you want future-proof infrastructure, look down. Build underground. Use the land above to grow power and crops. That’s how you turn your data center from a cost center into a long-term asset that supports your business, and everything around it.
A closed-loop system repurposes waste heat and leverages solar energy to drive efficiency and reduce emissions
One of the most underused assets in a data center is heat. When servers run, they produce thermal energy, most systems throw it away. That’s a waste of resources and an unnecessary environmental load. A closed-loop model flips that. It treats heat as a usable input for another system, not something to be discarded.
In this model, waste heat doesn’t go to waste. It’s redirected to support food-drying infrastructure powered with help from the sun. That’s solar-assisted dehydration, built right next to the data center. The goal here is not just avoiding waste, it’s precision: the heat supports the preservation of surplus crops, which reduces post-harvest losses and adds value to local farming economies. Everything feeds into something else.
Cooling is another area of transformation. Instead of using traditional chillers dependent on the grid and chemical refrigerants, this system runs on-site liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling. The LN2 plants run on solar, are quiet, free from synthetic refrigerants, and scalable in hot climates. The model also ensures the released nitrogen simply returns to the atmosphere, maintaining a clean cycle.
This closed-loop setup is logical, efficient, and sustainable. It connects digital infrastructure directly to agricultural and energy outcomes in a measurable way. You’re not importing cooling. You’re powering it onsite. You’re not just running servers, you’re fueling food supplies. You’re capturing energy slack and turning it into productivity.
Hiran Daluwatta, CEO of Noteworthy Global, makes it clear: this isn’t theory. This is a working blueprint. Countries can implement it now to meet net-zero goals and local sustainability targets. It’s modular and doesn’t require full-scale overhauls of everything at once. Integration doesn’t mean disruption, it means smarter sequencing.
For enterprise leaders, there’s strategic value in internalizing these flows. When your cooling system, power generation, and auxiliary operations are tied together, you control more of your inputs. That makes you less vulnerable to fluctuating energy pricing and regulatory shifts. It’s a step toward independent infrastructure with a minimal environmental footprint and fully integrated output streams.
The integrated model supports rural development and addresses diverse national challenges
Different regions have different constraints. Some are battling heat and geographic spread; others, high urban density or sharp net-zero targets. A one-size-fits-all infrastructure plan doesn’t work anymore. What does work is modular design, one that adapts to local priorities while supporting global energy and digital goals. That’s what this integrated model delivers.
In Australia, the challenge is clear: rising temperatures, vast land areas, and the need to extend digital infrastructure into rural zones. An underground data center provides thermal stability and a platform for off-grid energy use. Agrovoltaics and localized food drying create economic opportunity in areas where agricultural production is high, but digital reach is limited. This is a rural tech deployment strategy that also enhances energy resilience.
In the UK, the issue is limited available land and aggressive net-zero commitments. Embedding digital and agricultural production into the same footprint increases land-use efficiency, a priority for a country where space is highly competitive. It’s a viable way to meet digitization goals without competing with national food strategies or clean energy mandates.
Singapore has a different constraint: land scarcity and food import dependence. This model puts food production on top of the data center, not next to it. It introduces the prospect of partial food sovereignty by integrating solar-powered agriculture into the urban fabric. And with underground operations, it makes better use of the limited physical depth few countries ever touch.
Hiran Daluwatta, Founder and CEO of Noteworthy Global, calls this model a “blueprint that countries can deploy today to achieve net-zero targets, strengthen food resilience, and build the next generation of sustainable digital economies.” The idea is not future-oriented in the speculative sense, it’s designed for active rollout with current technologies and infrastructure.
For C-level leaders, the adaptability is the point. This isn’t about tearing down what exists. It’s about using smarter building logic, stacking utility where resources are tight, extracting value where operations used to just consume, and deploying infrastructure in ways that minimize trade-offs between tech, food, and energy. It brings policy goals, business objectives, and environmental stewardship into practical alignment. And it puts companies ahead in terms of ESG performance and infrastructure independence.
Main highlights
- Underground infrastructure unlocks energy and land efficiency: Leaders should consider underground data centers to reduce cooling energy demands, increase physical security, and repurpose surface land for agriculture and solar power, all within a single, high-output footprint.
- Waste heat and solar power amplify operational value: Executives can cut emissions and operating costs by adopting closed-loop systems that reuse server heat for food dehydration and power high-efficiency, solar-driven LN2 cooling, eliminating synthetic refrigerants and grid dependency.
- Modular design addresses region-specific challenges: Decision-makers in markets with land, climate, or food-security constraints can deploy this flexible model to align digital growth with sustainability goals, rural development, and energy independence, without needing large-scale structural overhauls.
