A newly released road map to improve local entrepreneurship includes the possibility of a boutique, hurricane-resistant, sustainable data centre on the island.

Sustainable, or green data centres, are data facilities designed to minimise environmental impact through energy-efficient technologies, renewable power and sustainable practices.

Bermuda’s digital infrastructure is constrained by high cloud costs and the absence of local compute capacity, says the Bermuda Entrepreneurship Blueprint compiled by the Ministry of Economy and Labour, and the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation.

“Exploring the feasibility of establishing a boutique green data centre in Bermuda presents a promising opportunity,” according to the report.

The blueprint goes on to say that such a data centre could provide affordable cloud services and advanced computing capacity to local micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

It used Ireland as an example of a place where domestic firms have been given access to high-quality digital tools and helped position the country as an exporter of digital services.

The report conceded that there were challenges with this idea, such as land availability and cost, but said the potential benefits merited a deeper look.

“It would provide start-ups with the ability to securely store and process data locally, reducing dependency on overseas data centres, enhancing data privacy and accelerating innovation,” the strategy stated.

There is growing concern about the amount of resources such as water, electricity and physical space used by non-sustainable data centres overseas, particularly those used for artificial intelligence.

Data centres often use fresh water to cool their server racks. In a BBC article published in February 2025, Venkatesh Uddameri, an American water resource management expert said a typical data centre can use between 11 million and 19 million litres of water per day, roughly the same as needed for a town of 30,000 to 50,000 people.

In 2022, Google reported a 20 per cent increase in its water consumption to 5.6 billion gallons owing to AI demands.

To reduce water consumption, some sustainable data centres are built with a closed-loop system that allows water to be reused, reducing consumption by about 70 per cent.

However, according to the information technology website Tier 1, sustainable data centres are often built in cooler climates where the lower temperatures naturally reduce the need for cooling and energy consumption.

The Bermuda Entrepreneurship Blueprint also raised the possibility of offering targeted relief or incentives for businesses focused on renewable energy or sustainability.

It suggested exploring partnerships with global technology firms to directly support local entrepreneurship such as affordable cloud services, secure data storage and compute for fintech, regtech and climate analytics.