The global conversation around climate and energy is becoming increasingly complex as energy demand and sustainability goals continue evolving at the same time. Governments, businesses, and consumers continue pushing for lower emissions and cleaner infrastructure while simultaneously accelerating the expansion of artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and data center construction. Each of those systems requires enormous amounts of power, cooling capacity, and water. Electricity demand from data centers surged by 17% in 2025, while AI-focused facilities grew even faster. At the same time, data center cooling can account for roughly 40% of electricity usage inside those facilities.
For Doug Hudson, CEO of ATS Energy, the challenge is not about producing more energy. It is about using the energy more efficiently without waste. From his perspective, the broader issue involves how industries think about climate progress itself.
"We keep talking about finding the 'silver bullet' to the climate problem," Hudson says. "The reality is that global systemic problems are rarely solved by one technology. They are solved when multiple systems start working together."
According to Hudson, ATS Energy develops technology designed to capture industrial waste heat and convert it into usable clean power. The company works across industrial environments where large amounts of thermal energy are continuously generated and lost through operations, including data centers and manufacturing facilities. He explains the broader opportunity extends beyond any single technology category because energy demand, climate concerns, and infrastructure expansion are now deeply connected.
"As AI infrastructure expands globally, the intersection between rising energy demand, water consumption, and climate goals is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore," Hudson says. "What once appeared to be separate conversations are now colliding across energy systems, industrial policy, and environmental planning." In the United States, policymakers have increasingly pushed large data center developers to secure or fund their own power generation as concerns grow around rising electricity demand, grid reliability, and water usage tied to AI expansion.
Proposed agreements tied to new AI infrastructure were designed to ensure data centers do not increase household electricity costs, strain water resources, or destabilize existing energy systems. Similar concerns are emerging internationally as governments attempt to balance industrial growth with energy security, grid reliability, water constraints, and emissions targets.
Hudson notes that AI chipsets generate significantly more heat than legacy compute infrastructure, increasing cooling requirements and energy consumption simultaneously. As cooling demand rises, water demand often rises alongside. Research found that large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, with water usage increasing as AI-focused facilities continue expanding. According to Hudson, those pressures are creating a broader conversation around how energy systems, climate goals, and resource management overlap.
"We are trying to pursue cleaner outcomes while also building some of the most energy-intensive infrastructure ever created," Hudson says. "This tension needs to be acknowledged openly if meaningful progress is going to happen."
From Hudson's perspective, the current climate technology landscape often treats solutions as competitors instead of complementary systems. "Solar, wind, thermal storage, carbon capture, nuclear innovation, and waste heat recovery are frequently positioned independently, even though each addresses a different part of the larger energy equation," Hudson says.
He explains that the conversation becomes even more complicated when industries such as steel, automotive manufacturing, oil and gas, chemical production, and heavy industrial processing enter the discussion. He notes those sectors remain among the world's largest energy consumers, yet they are also central to global supply chains and modern infrastructure.
"If the goal is reducing emissions and improving efficiency, then those industries have to be part of the conversation," Hudson says. "You cannot have large-scale climate progress while excluding the sectors with the largest energy footprints."
Hudson believes the broader public discussion sometimes overlooks how closely energy costs connect to everyday economic pressure. "When energy becomes more constrained or expensive, operational costs rise across transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and food distribution," he says. "Those increases eventually affect household affordability, particularly for those most vulnerable communities."
According to him, that is why the conversation cannot remain limited to environmental positioning alone. The issue increasingly affects economic resilience, industrial competitiveness, and long-term community stability.
Rather than framing climate technologies as competing alternatives, Hudson advocates for a coordinated systems approach at the facility level. He points to the possibility of combining renewable generation, battery storage, thermal storage, and waste heat recovery inside industrial environments to reduce pressure on the electrical grid while improving efficiency.
From his standpoint, the future conversation around climate and energy will likely depend less on identifying a single breakthrough and more on creating infrastructure capable of integrating multiple technologies simultaneously.
Hudson's background outside the traditional energy sector also shapes that perspective. Before joining ATS Energy, he spent more than two decades in cybersecurity, working on systems designed to protect critical infrastructure and large-scale digital platforms. He believes that experience reinforced the importance of systems thinking rather than isolated problem-solving.
"The climate and energy conversation has reached the point where collaboration matters more than ideology," Hudson says. "The technologies already exist to make meaningful progress. The real question is whether industries, policymakers, and innovators are willing to build solutions together instead of separately."
