The Green data center in Lupfig.
Keystone / Christian Beutler
Increasingly large data centers are emerging in Switzerland, including the development of artificial intelligence. Their environmental cost is considerable: by 2030, they could swallow up to 15% of national electricity consumption. Analysis of the SRF.
In Dielsdorf, a village in the canton of Zurich long turned to agriculture, agricultural areas have decreased by almost 1/5th in 40 years. The change has been particularly rapid in the past four years. Agriculture gives way to data economy.
The first high -performance calculation center in Green.ch, one of the largest digital service providers in Switzerland, was put into office there in 2023. Two others are under construction.
The three of them, these data centers should reach a total power of 35 megawatts. Once all in service in 2026, they will consume 7 times more electricity than the rest of the town of Dielsdorf, or about 1/10 of the city of Zurich.
The electrical services of the canton of Zurich (EKZ) are in the process of building a new substation directly on the campus site to guarantee the security of the supply.
>> Before (2020) and after (2025): View of the site where the Green.ch campus is built in Dielsdorf. The three new high performance data centers are surrounded in red, the new transformation position in blue:
External contents
By its flat topography and size, the Dielsdorf site is ideal for building a data center. The village is not far from the city of Zurich, which shelters the seats of many groups and companies in finance and the service sector.
But Dielsdorf is not an isolated case. Nearly a dozen new high -performance data centers have recently been built or will open in the coming years in Switzerland.
The impact of the EA boom
A world without data centers is unthinkable these days. A large part of what we do on the Internet – we consult a website or save data in the cloud – takes place in these huge buildings filled with high performance computers, which require complex maintenance and cooling.
And the demand for computing power has further increased since the large -scale distribution of tools using artificial intelligence (AI) as chatgpt.
AI does not only gain popularity with individuals. Many firms use it for data analysis, trend forecasts, personalized recommendations or advertising.
More and more companies rent space in data centers in Switzerland and use part of the servers. Among them: Google, Amazon and Microsoft. The latter has just announced an investment of $ 400 million in Swiss data centers for the cloud and the AI.
>> See the French adaptation of the SRF report:
Up to 15% of electricity by 2030
These developments have considerable repercussions on our landscape and our energy infrastructure. According to a study by the Haute École de Lucerne mandated by the Federal Energy Office (OFEN), data centers in Switzerland consumed around 2.1 electricity terawatt hours in 2019, or around 3.6% of national consumption.
Questioned by the German -speaking Swiss radiation, Adrian Altenburger, author of the study and professor at the Haute École de Lucerne, estimates that their share is already between 6 and 8% already and could, if the country’s electricity consumption remains generally stable, reaching up to 15% by 2030. It would be more than the total consumption of the canton of Zurich in 2023.
Precise information on data centers is often not communicated. Srf Data has mappedExternal link More than 120, thus offering for the first time an overview of this expanding sector.
It turns out that the data centers are preferably built where the digital infrastructure offers the best conditions.
Optical fiber networks (green areas on the map), but also electric (yellow lines on the map) well developed are essential.
This is particularly the case in central Switzerland, in urban regions such as Geneva and Zurich or even at the “Laufenburg star”, one of the main nodes of the European electricity network, where the construction of the largest battery in the world began in early May.
Despite the pressure exerted by these new large consumers of electricity, there is no risk of overload of the network at the moment, according to Adrian Altenburger, of the Haute École de Lucerne.
But it does not exclude for the future a scenario similar to that of the Grand Dublin, where a moratorium on the construction of new data centers was decreed until 2028. In 2023, data centers in Ireland consumed almost 21% of the country’s total electricity.
Switzerland becomes a European pole for data centers
Switzerland’s reputation in terms of strict data protection, its political stability, the availability of green energy, the low seismic risk and the fact that Zurich is a flourishing pole for AI help to explain that the country now displays one of the strongest densities of data centers per inhabitant in Europe.
Since 2017, the Confederation has been receiving growing attention from international investors with significant capital. The analysis of the SRF shows that their arrival has transformed the market of data centers, which become increasingly large and powerful.
If the development of data centers in Switzerland has many advantages for the population (better data protection, faster internet services), recent cases also highlight potential problems.
Increase in water consumption
Example in Beringen, a Schaffhousois village where one of the most powerful data centers in Switzerland will open in 2026. It will consume as much electricity as 3/4 of the entire canton of Schaffhouse in 2022.
To be able to cover its energy needs, the Canton’s electricity supplier is forced to build a new substation, funded by the operator.
But depending on the cooling technology used, data centers do not only require a lot of energy, but also a lot of water to cool servers farms.
In Bringen, the municipal council authorized a volume of 55,000 cubic meters, the equivalent of 110 swimming pools filled per year. But it is not certain that it is enough, because it depends on the local climate. If summer is too hot, it will take more cooling water.
In the event of prolonged drought, it would be necessary to draw on the water table or to obtain from neighboring municipalities to ensure the operation of the infrastructure. Data centers are often cooled with treated drinking water, although the use of gray water or lake water is also possible.
Other data centers, such as that of Dielsdorf, use closed cooling circuits and therefore require very little water.
Residual heat waste
Another friction point lies in the fact that, very often, no solution is found to exploit the residual heat generated by the operation of a data center.
In Beringen, the construction was approved before it even has clarified how this heat could be used. However, a study later showed that only 30% of heat was used locally. A storage lake could now store excess heat for the winter and the city of Schaffhouse should also benefit from it.
The same goes for Winterthour, where four data centers with a total power of 40 megawatts are currently under construction. Once put into service, they will increase the city’s electricity consumption by around 50%. These data centers are designed in a sustainable way, and plan to inject the massive quantities of residual heat which they produce in the heating network remotely.
However, they are 700 meters from a waste incineration plant, which covers around 20% of the city’s heat needs. In other words, their residual heat would feed an already supplied network. Winterthour therefore wishes to enlarge its network and use the heat of the servers at least during the heating gourmet winter days.
Incorporating private data centers as a heat suppliers would also involve long -term planning. Because the use of their residual heat depends on economic factors, in particular the extension of fixed -term rental contracts and a stable request.
Microsoft recently withdrew from several projects from planned data centers, proof of the great uncertainty to which the domain is subject.
The branch called to make efforts
Data centers constitute the spine of our digital world, but they also cause considerable environmental costs. This does not escape operators of data centers, who are numerous in Switzerland to strive to operate their data centers with 100% renewable energy.
Angela Müller, director of the Swiss algorithmwatch NGO, pleads for her part for the thoughtful use of AI, rather than using it without discernment wherever this is technically possible: “There are fascinating AI applications which can really help us to take up ecological challenges. On the other hand, the AI systems integrated into the toothbrushes or which write our emails are quite distant, ”she believes.
The data used by the SRF for its analysis come from various sources, including: Netzwoche.ch, Datacentermap.com, Datacenterplatform.com as well as the websites of the various operators of data centers.
The information was verified as much as possible by the SRF and, in some cases, updated. For declared surface data centers, an estimate of the surface was carried out on the basis of satellite image analysis.
In addition to the Basic SWISSTOPO card, the fiber optic network was represented thanks to the Atlas of the broad band of the Federal Communication Office, and the network of electrical installations of more than 36 KV obtained from the Federal Energy Office (Geodienste.ch).
>> The full version of the large multimedia format of the SRF (original version in German) is to be viewed iciExternal link.
Adaptation and translation of German: Pauline Turban
