Forty mayors sign pact for sustainable urban data centers

Forty mayors from cities across the globe have signed a new pact to establish common standards for the sustainable development and operation of urban data centers, citing growing concerns over the facilities' strain on electricity grids, water supplies, and available land. The Global Urban Data Centres Pact was unveiled on Tuesday, June 23, 2026, during London Climate Action Week by C40 Cities, a network of nearly 100 cities focused on climate action.

The initiative emerged from discussions between the mayors of Phoenix, Arizona, and Melbourne, Australia, who found their cities grappling with identical challenges. Officials said the rapid expansion of data centers, driven largely by demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing, is consuming vast quantities of resources and competing with other development needs. Cassie Sutherland, a managing director at C40, said the challenges were found to be very similar in every region, prompting the effort to create a unified framework of conditions under which cities will accept new data center projects.

The pact outlines specific standards for future development. It calls for data centers to be built on abandoned or...