By Philippa Campion, 2026 intern at GreenScale

I had been interested in sustainability for a long time before joining GreenScale and was looking for an internship where I could explore working within it. I am particularly interested in sectors with significant environmental impact and how they can be made more sustainable. Data centres were not something I was initially drawn to even though most of what I had heard was negative: high energy and water use, noise and visual pollution and pressure on local grids.

But the idea of building data centres – infrastructure often seen as inherently environmentally damaging – around sustainability was what made me apply to GreenScale. I wanted to understand how feasible a genuinely sustainable data centre was, what the constraints were and where the opportunities to do things differently lay.

The most important realisation for me has been about how much a data centre’s overall sustainability is shaped by decisions made long before operation. I found researching potential sites and developing a demographic assessment template particularly interesting as it showed me how factors like local skills, competing employers, transport, accessibility and the surrounding community can all affect whether a site works now and remains viable in the future.

I have also learned how differently data centres can be designed and operated. Cooling systems, retrofitting, modular design, embodied carbon and power availability in particular all affect their sustainability and longevity. Being non-technical has been useful for helping to turn a technical presentation into a blog, review content and create LinkedIn posts and a presentation from an outsider’s perspective. Technical terms such as closed-loop cooling, PPAs and fault ride-through have become part of how I understand the industry and approach my work.

Through competitor analysis, sustainability and procurement research, website content and technical communications, I have seen how differently companies present sustainability. Whilst some set clear targets and show progress, others rely more heavily on broad claims. This built on university work I had done exploring how brands construct and communicate sustainability, giving me the chance to see this in practice. This has reinforced what makes sustainability claims credible to me: specific targets and explanations, visible progress, consistent standards, third-party verification, community feedback and accountability.

This internship has also shown me a range of roles I hadn’t even considered, from pre-construction and procurement to site selection and community engagement. Site selection in particular is now an area I am interested in exploring.

More broadly, I think the industry needs to communicate much better with the public. Data centres are critical infrastructure and underpin far more than AI, yet public debate can easily become reduced to AI water or energy consumption. The industry needs to more clearly explain their importance and their impacts – and how they are addressing them – in language people can actually understand.

I started the internship wondering whether a genuinely sustainable data centre could really exist. I now think the more useful deliberation is how every aspect – from location and power to design, materials, community impact and operation – can make them more sustainable.

Philippa was joined on her internship by Ben Fitzjohn. Both are students at the London Interdisciplinary School and spent eight weeks with GreenScale over the summer. We hope to welcome more students in the years ahead and have publicly committed to creating at least 25 early-career opportunities by 2030.