IMAGINE HEATING 35,000 apartments with the waste hot air that billows from a data centre, or using it to keep an Olympic swimming pool warm for fifteen years. Better still, what about cooling Europe’s first gigascale AI campus in Portugal, using seawater? These ideas may seem like features of a tech-utopia, containing the kind of radical optimism that gets watered down in reality. But they are not just ideas, they they they are working systems coming to life in Stockholm, Paris and Sines on the Portuguese coast.
The data centre has become AI’s most visible environmental problem. Statistics about water and energy consumption per prompt have entered everyday conversation, even if the numbers remain fiercely debated. These ingenious solutions to reuse waste heat are the work of engineers who stopped viewing AI’s immense thermal footprint as a crisis and began to see it as a resource.
Professor Daniel Neyland, Co-Director of the Bristol Digital Futures Institute, has been watching this kind of innovation for decades. “There’s a huge amount of innovation happening with an enormous number of super-bright people,” he says. “It’s always really exciting because we never know what the outcome will be.”
But the most exciting answer to AI’s environmental footprint may not be in the data centre at all. It may be on the board inside every device that connects to one.
Conventional printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing is a process almost no one thinks about, yet every smartphone, every server, every GPU in every AI data centre across the globe contains PCBs. Sustainable PCB manufacturing has never been more urgent. Manufacturing starts with a copper-clad sheet and etches away everything you don’t need. The process consumes three to four times as much copper as the finished circuit uses, generates large volumes of hazardous wastewater, and leaves a carbon footprint accounting for up to 30 per cent of a smartphone’s total emissions.
Tokyo-based Elephantech is a deep-tech start-up and pioneer in sustainable PCB manufacturing. Founded in 2014, they asked a different question: what if you only put copper where you actually need it?
Their answer is SustainaCircuits. It’s a proprietary additive manufacturing process that uses high-precision inkjet printing to deposit copper nanoink directly onto the substrate, tracing the circuit and nothing else. This results in 70 per cent less copper, a 74.9 per cent reduction in total CO2 emissions across the production process, and a 95.4 per cent reduction in wastewater and chemical treatment.
Elephantech’s NeuralJet technology uses AI to control the landing position of individual ink droplets, each one just 4.8 picolitres, smaller than a human cell. In precision tests, the jet fired 2,596 droplets into grooves just 40 micrometres wide: every single one landed true. It is, in miniature, exactly the kind of human-machine ingenuity that Neyland is describing.
CEO Shinya Shimizu says they are committed to revolutionising the PCB industry through nanomaterial innovation. At the time of writing, Elephantech had just announced a partnership with Mitsubishi, providing “strong momentum for us to accelerate the global deployment of SustainaCircuits.”
This partnership marks more than just a corporate milestone for Elephantech; it represents the industrial validation of a ‘print-first’ future. As NeuralJet and SustainaCircuits move into mass-market hardware, we move toward an era where the intelligence of our devices matches the intelligence of their construction.
