Whether it’s energy, water, or land, modern data centers are consuming more resources to support the growth of next-generation technologies, such as AI.

Until recently, demand for electricity remained flat as more efficient technologies entered the market and industry worked together to design foundational metrics that measure and monitor how resource consumption impacts data center performance. For the last 20 years, those legacy metrics, including power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE), have set the global standard for assessing data center performance.

However, the industry has evolved, and the processes to build, maintain, and operate a data center have become increasingly complex. Further, as demand for resources increases, the need for modern tools and metrics to optimize data center efficiency and compliance – and lead better decision-making and community trust – has never been greater.

As the focus on data centers has grown, the industry has continued its collaboration on state-of-the-art tools and metrics. To respond to this need, a series of new, purpose-built metrics and tools from The Green Grid, an affiliate of ITI, stand to empower decision-makers with the critical insights needed to reduce costs, preserve resources, and improve facility performance.

Designed to be simple to use and easy to understand, these new metrics build on trusted tools like The Green Grid’s PUE, WUE, and carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) to take a more holistic approach to how the information and communications technology (ICT) and data center industries are addressing resource management challenges amid the rising use of AI in data centers. Specifically, these new metrics provide data center designers, operators, and owners with a more accurate, transparent reading of how these facilities are performing.

Measuring the evolving resource landscape

Where a facility is sited and how it is designed are critical considerations for any data center looking to use potentially limited resources effectively and sustainably. While metrics like PUE transformed the industry’s approach to energy management, new and more comprehensive metrics like data center resource effectiveness (DCRE) have been designed to capture the effectiveness and interrelationship of many categories of resources consumed by a data center, including energy, water, and land use.

Tools that allow scoring facilities on a single factor, multiple factors, or all factors empower data center developers, owners, and operators with detailed, real-time information necessary to adjust operations to the growing and quickly evolving resource landscape and make smart decisions.

Addressing water’s impact

With public concerns on data center water consumption mounting, new tools that focus on water only, like the water usage impact (WUI) metric, equip data center developers, owners, and operators with detailed information on a facility's impact on local water resources. By combining water consumption with water stress, these comprehensive metrics build on the legacy of WUE to enable responsible water stewardship across the data center industry. Notably, this information can help inform data center site selection, assist in optimizing cooling methods, boost transparency and credibility, and track performance and efficiency more effectively.

Evaluating work capacity

Sourcing reliable and resilient power has quickly become the cornerstone challenge for data centers when considering how to scale. With the industry experiencing significant power constraints, avoiding stranded power in the data center, the concept of energy being available but not used, is essential for improving facility performance while advancing energy efficiency.

To ensure that data centers can adjust and expand capacity, data center owners and operators need to evaluate server work capacity properly. New metrics like information technology work capacity (ITWC) can measure how effective a data center is at turning energy into compute. They can also assess server performance and identify where capacity is not being effectively utilized, with future versions aiming to expand to GPU workloads.

The data center revolution has only just begun. With more than $580 billion in data center investments in 2025 alone, the demand for resources to support this unprecedented digital infrastructure expansion will only grow. Metrics like DCRE, WUI, and ITWC have laid the foundation, but meeting this moment will require a collective effort from industry to shape the next two decades of data center efficiency and digital sustainability, just like PUE did back in 2007.