Recently, the US Green Building Council (USGBC) awarded a LEED Platinum certification to Digital Realty (DLR) for an upcoming data center in Silicon Valley which will be occupied by Nvidia (NVDA), a company specializing in chip making. This data center will boast of being the world’s most energy efficient company. Earlier in June, Digital Realty was awarded with a LEED-CI Gold certification for its 1500 Space park property in Santa Clara.  The company is the process of getting LEED certifications for other ongoing projects.

The CTO of Digital Realty, Jim Smith, highlighted the company’ achievement pointing the company’s focus  on all the key issues such as building materials, construction practices, as well as building materials. Attention was given to the design of the building including the operating energy efficiency of the data center. He added that the company repeatedly met the sustainable and effective corporate green strategies through the LEED program which was in conjunction with PUE optimized datacenter. He pointed out that the facility was able to achieve a Peak Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.31 during commissioning. The site has the facility to gauge PUE every 15 minutes and indentify the trends in the PUE metrics over a period.

To utilize 100% outside air for cooling, Nvidia facility will use air side economization. This will prove to be as asset for the facility as it will be able to use 65% of air side economization each year. The company predicts that at a full load, it would generate an estimated 3.5 million kilowatt hours of annual energy or equivalent to energy savings worth more than $250,000 annually at existing energy prices.

Ranga Jayraman, Chief information Officer of Nvidia, reiterated that the company was committed to the overall environmental goals and the focal point is to efficiently operate their data center. He acknowledged the superiority of Digital Realty in building and managing highly energy efficient data centers which will assist Nvidia to track the performance of their operations so that it is aligned with the company’s environmental goals.

The Nvidia facility is only the second active data center in the US to be awarded the LEED Platinum certification and is in the league with the American College testing facility in Iowa. Earlier, a Citigroup data center based out of Germany earned a platinum status. Sacramento based Advanced Data Centers has also been pre-certified for Platinum status.