Before diving into what’s broken about today’s data-center landscape — and there’s plenty to critique — I want to start with a different kind of infrastructure: the redwood forests near my home in Northern California. Stand among those giants and you can feel how a living system works. Every tree, root, lichen, and drop of moisture plays a role in a regenerative, interconnected whole. Nothing operates alone. Nothing wastes. Everything contributes to the resilience of everything else.
That’s the mindset we need as we build the physical backbone of the AI era.
Over the next five years, humanity will spend roughly $7 trillion constructing new digital infrastructure: data centers, transmission lines, fiber networks, cooling systems. These facilities already consume about 1.5 percent of global electricity — and demand is accelerating so fast that by 2030 they may use more power than Japan consumes today.
The scale is staggering. But so is the opportunity. We don’t have to replicate the extractive, resource-intensive systems that created our current problems.
Instead, we can ask: How would nature design a data center?
Learning From the Only Proven Model
Nature’s systems are efficient because they are deeply interconnected. Mangroves desalinate water. Coral reefs strengthen over time. Forests engineer their own microclimates. These are infrastructure systems that regenerate, not deplete, their surrounding environment.
This isn’t poetic metaphor — it’s practical necessity. In 2009, scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified nine planetary boundaries essential for a habitable Earth. As of 2025, humanity has already breached seven of them. When one system degrades, others follow. When one heals, others improve.
Our task, then, is not just to reduce harm. It’s to design digital infrastructure that actively restores balance, using nature’s operating principles as our blueprint.
At Endeavour, we frame our mission as a simple design assignment:
- Restore soil and water systems.
- Ensure that waste becomes food.
- Use biocompatible materials.
If we can meet the world’s need for compute while meeting these three criteria, we can build a digital future that is regenerative, not extractive.
Restoring Soil and Water
Soil may seem worlds away from semiconductors, but it is the foundation of almost every planetary boundary: climate regulation, water storage, nutrient cycling, biodiversity. And it’s disappearing at a dangerous rate.
Water is where soil restoration starts — and where data-center design often goes wrong. The industry typically builds in dry, electricity-rich regions like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, where water is anything but abundant. A single hyperscale data center can use millions of gallons per day for cooling. Communities are pushing back. Tucson and Indianapolis have both rejected high-profile projects because residents refused to sacrifice their aquifers.
They’re right. No community should have to trade drinking water or farmland for cloud computing.
That’s why we’ve invested in waterless cooling systems that use closed-loop thermal circuits. Once charged, they operate essentially indefinitely without consuming additional water. But neutrality isn’t enough. We aim to be water-positive — returning more water to a region than we take.
One pathway is so simple: rooftop and pavement rainwater capture. Data centers already shed this water away from the building — tens of millions of gallons a year — but we are redirecting it. That water can recharge wetlands, support regenerative agriculture, and revive ecosystems devastated by drought. In many regions, bird populations have declined by half since 1970; restoring water restores life.
Imagine data centers that create water, rehydrate soils, and become hubs of ecological recovery. This is not theoretical — it’s the model we’re building.
Waste Equals Food
Nature has no waste — only nutrients cycling through different forms. Dust from the Sahara fertilizes the Amazon. Salmon carry marine nutrients into forest soils. Everything feeds something else.
Digital infrastructure can work the same way.
Data centers produce enormous amounts of heat. Instead of venting it, we can channel it into district heating, greenhouses, or even public swimming pools — as communities in Finland and Denmark already do. Combine that heat with CO₂ and moisture, and you can support year-round agriculture in cold climates.
One especially powerful symbiotic partner is algae. It doubles its mass daily, captures carbon, and produces oils, proteins, and bioplastics that can replace palm oil, animal feed, or petrochemical precursors. Co-located algae farms can turn data-center emissions into valuable materials while relieving pressure on forests, croplands, and water systems.
Organic waste — everything from food scraps to sewage to plastics — can also become fuel. With anaerobic digesters enhanced by graphite, we can cut processing times nearly in half and produce both methane for power and nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer. The outputs support energy generation and soil regeneration simultaneously.
When you connect these loops, a new kind of infrastructure emerges: data centers that power themselves with local waste, produce heat for communities, supply water and fertilizer to farms, and reduce pressure on ecosystems.
That is what circular infrastructure looks like.
Building With Biocompatible Materials
Many of the materials used in today’s infrastructure — especially plastics and PFAS — are toxic, persistent, and incompatible with biological systems. They accumulate in soils, waterways, and our bodies.
We need materials nature can metabolize.
One pathway is methane pyrolysis, which splits methane into hydrogen (a clean fuel) and solid graphite. Graphite can be added to concrete, batteries, and composites, strengthening them while reducing the need for carbon-intensive cement. Since concrete accounts for 8 percent of global emissions, substitutions here have enormous climate benefits.
When the methane source is biogenic — such as food waste — the resulting graphite can even be carbon-negative, storing atmospheric carbon in long-lasting materials.
From graphite, we can derive graphene, a super-material 200 times stronger than steel and incredibly lightweight. Blended with biodegradable polymers, graphene enables waterproof, PFAS-free fabrics and membranes. When those materials reach end of life, enzymes can break down the biopolymer, leaving the graphite for reuse.
Nothing wasted. Everything cycled.
Biomimicry + AI: A New Design Frontier
Biomimicry — learning from nature’s strategies — is one of the most powerful design tools we have. The springtail, a tiny soil insect, stays perfectly dry thanks to nanostructures that repel water without chemicals. Engineers now use its design to create safer waterproof fabrics.
But AI unlocks an entirely new dimension. AI can scan millions of biological studies, extract underlying principles, and help us combine natural strategies in ways no human could envision. When we feed AI a library of nature’s solutions and ask, “What’s possible?” we broaden the bounds of sustainable engineering.
Building the Economics of Regeneration
A regenerative vision must still pencil out financially. The fossil-fuel system has enjoyed a century of subsidies; sustainable infrastructure needs business models that compete on their own merits.
Endeavour is structured as a purpose trust, allowing us to reinvest profits, prioritize long-term resilience, and align value creation with ecological health. In nature, this is called stacking functions — every element serves multiple purposes. Our data centers compute, but they also generate clean water, cycle nutrients, supply heat, produce materials, and support local ecosystems.
For cloud customers, these benefits come bundled with greater resilience and lower risk. The greenest option also becomes the smartest economic choice.
A Future Worth Building
Communities today are rightfully skeptical of traditional data centers, which often bring noise, glare, and water stress. Our goal is to flip that narrative. When we enter a region, we lead with benefits: water replenishment, agricultural partnerships, local hiring, ecological restoration, and long-term economic resilience.
Our data centers in Spain and Atlanta already run on waterless cooling. New facilities in Ohio and Texas will demonstrate fully closed-loop systems that generate power, water, and soil health at once.
This is not charity — it’s durability. Infrastructure that strengthens communities is infrastructure that endures.
Ultimately, the question isn’t whether AI and digital growth will reshape our world — they will. The question is whether the infrastructure behind them will erode planetary boundaries or help restore them.
Nature shows us what’s possible. If we design our digital systems the way ecosystems function — interconnected, circular, regenerative — we can build a future where the digital revolution heals more than it harms.
That is our challenge. And our opportunity.
