Emilio Tenuta: Why the Future of Growth Runs Through Water

For most of the past century, water was treated as a background input – cheap, local and largely taken for granted. That assumption no longer holds. 

As data centres scale to meet the demands of AI and cloud computing, the sector is confronting a resource constraint that cannot be engineered away without a deliberate strategy. 

Emilio Tenuta, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at Ecolab, has spent decades building the case that operational performance and environmental stewardship are not mutually exclusive. In the context of data centres, he contends that managing water is no longer a compliance matter. Instead, it is a business imperative and can even be a competitive differentiator.

Ecolab operates across virtually every industry, providing water, hygiene, infection prevention and resource management solutions to customers worldwide. Its positioning covers science, data and operational services – meaning it sits close to many of the sector’s most pressing infrastructure challenges. Emilio’s role spans that breadth, with sustainability embedded into business strategy rather than treated as a separate function.