New York City — The U.S. Green Building Council is working with data center project teams and owners to highlight sustainability in their development and operations, the group’s leaders said at the 2026 Greenbuild International Conference + Expo Tuesday, where data center sustainability has been an event focus.
“Data center owners and developers are recognizing that they need to be more transparent” about sustainability, Elizabeth Beardsley, senior policy counsel at USGBC, said in an interview at the conference. “The lack of transparency, in some cases, has hindered their community engagement and backfired in terms of public sentiment.”
As of September, more than 2,000 data centers globally are LEED-certified and registered, representing 591 million square feet, according to USGBC. About 350 U.S. data centers are LEED-certified, according to Beardsley. LEED — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is a widely recognized green building certification standard.
USGBC is working on several compliance pathways for data center building performance, Beardsley said. Earlier this year, in partnership with other organizations, USGBC launched the Greening AI Data Centers Coalition, a global initiative to set standards for the sector.
Four states have data-center-specific building performance disclosures and other states have benchmarking laws, Beardsley said.
The growing dialog among stakeholders and communities around the country about what these facilities might look like is a positive development, Beardsley said. Some communities get significant financial benefits from data centers — money that might help lower taxes, generate investment in local energy resources and boost resilience — so a lot is at stake, she said.
Examples of agreements that might come out of this dialogue include payments to help residents make energy efficiency retrofits in their homes or having data centers include battery storage to help reduce their peak energy use while also providing resilience for local homeowners, according to Beardsley.
“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.
Renewable energy is another potential sustainability feature of these facilities, she said. Polls show residents are more likely to accept data centers if they are powered by renewable or clean energy, she said.
“We’re incentivizing use of renewable energy, and I think we see opportunity … to do even more in terms of encouraging some of those community energy best practices and opportunities, like reuse of waste heat,” she said.
Disclosure: The 2026 Greenbuild International Conference + Expo and Facilities Dive are both owned by Informa. The Greenbuild Conference has no influence over Facilities Dive's coverage.
