Decades into a career at Ecolab, Emilio Tenuta, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, continues to demonstrate why it’s essential to embed sustainability into a company’s business strategy, explaining that operational performance and environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive. The growth of AI and data centres is proof that companies must do this, not by choice, but by necessity.

Emilio joined Ecolab in the early 1980s, and since then he has spent more than two decades across technical, marketing and business management roles in industries ranging from food and beverage to pharmaceuticals, automotive and primary metals. 

For the past 17 years, he has led the company’s sustainability strategy, a function he has positioned not as a reporting obligation but as a driver of business growth. That framing shapes how he approaches what has become one of the most pressing infrastructure challenges in technology: the collision between data centre expansion and finite water supplies.

Defining sustainability as a business performance role

Emilio frames his role as Chief Sustainability Officer in operational terms, explaining that water and resource strategy now sit within core business performance – especially in the digital infrastructure space.  

“The core challenge is simple,” he says. “Data centre growth is colliding with real resource limits, especially energy and water. As power demand rises, it often increases upstream water impact. At the same time, AI and high-density computing are driving much higher heat loads, which can quickly raise cooling intensity and water use if they're not managed well.”

He points to projections showing that by 2030, AI is expected to consume power comparable to the electricity demands of India and water equivalent to the annual drinking water needs of the United States. Emilio sees those numbers as a challenge to solve rather than an argument against growth. 

“The opportunity is that this doesn't have to slow growth,” he says. “With smarter cooling design, real-time monitoring and continuous optimisation, operators can decouple growth from resource use. When done right, it improves uptime, efficiency and cost performance all at once.”

That framing underpins Ecolab’s offerings to data centre operators. The Ecolab® Water Navigator IQ™ is an AI-enabled platform that quantifies risk in financial terms and integrates leading datasets to provide a single, enterprise-wide view of a company’s water management plans. For industry and data centres, the tool turns data into insights to drive action at the local level. On the cooling side, Ecolab’s 3D TRASAR™ Technology for direct-to-chip liquid cooling combines monitoring with AI-led insights to protect servers while reducing water and energy consumption.

Partnerships and external roles extend influence beyond Ecolab

Emilio’s leadership extends beyond Ecolab into industry associations and coalitions focused on shared water challenges. He holds board positions at Tandem Global and Green Key Global, chairs the sustainability committee for the American Chemistry Council and sits on the executive sustainability committee for the American Hotel & Lodging Association. 

He is also involved in the Water Resilience Coalition, a group of 42 companies representing approximately US$5tn in market value working across 100 priority basins with an impact on more than three billion people.

Those partnerships, he explains, are necessary if companies are to manage water risk at the basin level rather than site by site. “Partnerships create scale, speed and credibility, and they're essential to addressing water scarcity while supporting long-term business performance,” he says. “Progress depends on collaboration, common metrics and turning data into action.”