Aligned Data Centers this week announced OriginMark, a material traceability system the provider says will accelerate circular asset management and supply chain decarbonization.

OriginMark identifies and quantifies the embodied carbon — the amount of CO2 emitted during manufacturing — of all materials that make up a data center, Chief Innovation Officer Phill Lawson-Shanks told SDxCentral.

The system supports circularity by providing visibility into all materials at a component level and offering granular insight into how each component and sub-component should be dealt with at its end of use.

OriginMark uses a unique identifier akin to a QR code to tag every piece of data center component, which allows Aligned to avoid component duplication. The tags are then attached to a data set that the provider and its suppliers are continually expanding, Lawson-Shanks explained.

To estimate the embodied carbon in data center equipment, Aligned also takes into account where materials are sourced. For example, the company would consider where the steel for the chassis of a server was forged.

"As the process matures, our vendors will be ascribing a higher fidelity of material-sourced data for all of their finished goods that feed into our supply chain," Lawson-Shanks said.

"The goal is to eventually tag each of their finished goods or sub-components with OriginMark so when they come to Aligned’s site, we can then scan and track their lifecycle using our Aligned Insight — from manufacturing and transport, to installation, commissioning, and operational lifecycle, through end-of-life and recycling," he added.

OriginMark will be packaged within the Aligned Insight platform alongside a customer portal, building management systems reporting, secure API tools, telepresence operational support, autonomous robotics and sentry, intercept, and maintenance systems.

The Aligned Insight platform will help the provider expand this circular-focused system with its partners both during construction of new data center builds and expansion of existing infrastructure.

According to Lawson-Shanks, the platform allows Aligned and its partners to identify embodied carbon and implement circular lifecycles for generators, power distribution units, and uninterruptible power supply units, along with all other data center construction and operation components.

"Having buy-in from our vendor partners and transparency into reliable carbon data sets are key to being able to measure and ultimately reduce the environmental footprint of data centers," he said. Aligned plans to announce key data center and cloud partners that will expand deployment of the circular asset management system.

Along with reducing Aligned's environmental impact, the integration of OriginMark positions Aligned to "more aggressively meet the carbon reduction goals of our customers by empowering better decision-making throughout the lifecycle of our equipment," Lawson-Shanks added.

This announcement comes in the wake of Aligned's $1.25 billion sustainability-linked financing to construct a waterless data center using the provider's Delta3 cooling technology. According to the provider, Delta3 removes heat as it is produced, and uses 80% less energy and 85% less water than standard data center cooling techniques.