A wind turbine in a green natural landscape.

nLighten
Innovative sustainability solutions

On one side of the picture is a young girl sitting in front of a computer with an adult man is supporting her. On the other side is a wind turbine in a green natural landscape.

At nLighten, at the core of our DNA is the ambition to deliver more sustainable digital services.

The data center industry continues to grow empowering the digital transformation of our society. Such growth requires increasing amounts of energy and natural resources, making sustainability¹ pivotal in this industry. We recognize that by operating and expanding our business our environmental footprint including climate change impact grows and hence requires a more sustainable and responsible manner of delivering services.

Our Vision is to increasingly integrate our data centers into the local community’s energy infrastructure.

What do we mean by that?

We call this integration “sector coupling”. It is a collaboration between our own energy systems and those of other sectors seeking to achieve lower community emissions. The explosive growth of the digital economy means there are now many more people and businesses using much more data – and energy. nLighten aims to offer infrastructure services that are based on a different approach to traditional colocation data centers. The plan is to implement innovative sustainable solutions in collaboration with the local community.

¹Please note that the use of any ESG or sustainability related terminology on this site does not denote any alignment or classification with any form of ESG rating, taxonomy, or legislation.

In short: the more energy we use, the more we generate.

Our approach gives you high-performance connectivity and will be based on a sustainable infrastructure platform. It supports your business today while laying the foundations for future generations’ digital economy.

Our innovations…

Icon of an electrical plug sprouting from the leaves of a plant.

Energy management

Across our data centers we plan to increasingly procure renewable power sources. These have the potential to substantially reduce our emissions while supporting power sharing with local utilities. All part of nLighten’s environmental vision.

Icon of a seamlessly floating heat circuit between data centers and local urban community.

Thermal management

So how do we envisage this energy sharing to work? Electrical energy consumed in data centers is converted to heat by server and network loads. Having a data center close by to Germany’s main urban areas enables us to locally recover and export this heat energy to the community.
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We are installing the latest generation of cooling systems across many of our German sites. These cooling systems have the ability to seamlessly upgrade server heat to directly usable temperatures – creating a carbon free heat source to assist district heating systems. These higher operating temperatures also remove the need for evaporative cooling, conserving water across our data center portfolio.

Icon of an industrial fan, a crossed out CO2 symbol, and an electrical plug shaped like an infinity symbol.

Grid stabilization

The energy transition requires an increasing amount of renewable power generation, which is often weather-dependent and results in variable grid capacity. At nLighten, our goal is to increasingly create a varied load profile across an increasing number of our data centers such that they no longer form a constant burden. Using carbon neutral on-site generation, our ambition is to assist these capacity deficits via grid stabilization.This can create a further synergy between the growth of our data centers and emission reductions in community infrastructure.

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nLightenInnovative sustainability solutions