An Nvidia data center in Silicon Valley has achieved LEED Platinum certification by the U.S. Green Building Council. The facility was designed and built by San Francisco, Calif.-based Digital Realty Trust. The council issues LEED certification to construction projects that maximize use of sustainable building practices, such as ensuring efficient energy and water consumption and using recycled materials or materials that have minimal impact on the environment.

"Achieving LEED platinum certification means that attention has been paid to every aspect of the building's design and construction, including the operating energy efficiency of the finished datacenter as well as often overlooked, key issues such as building materials, materials re-use and construction practices," DRT CTO Jim Smith said in a statement. DRT announced the achievement on Monday.

One of the data center's "green design" features is its use of air-side economization, allowing it to use 100 percent outside air to cool the equipment. DRT estimanted that the facility's location will enable the its operators to use free cooling for more than 65 percent of each year. At peak performance, the feature will allow the facility's operators to save about 3.5 million kWh of utility power it draws annually, translating into a yearly electricity bill that is smaller by about $250,000.

DRT Director of Investor Relations Pamela Matthews said the data center came online at the beginning of this year. "It was a speculative build, but we leased it very close to beginning of construction to (Nvidia)."

The facility is the second US data center to achieve LEED Platinum certification. The first one - an enterprise data center owned and operated by education and workforce performance assessment provider American College Testing - was announced in August.

The world's first data center to achieve the highest-degree LEED certification was a Citigroup facility in Frankfurt, Germany. The achievement was announced in April.