Accurately predicting the cold load of industrial buildings is a crucial step in establishing an energy consumption management system for industrial constructions, which plays a significant role in advancing sustainable development. However, due to diverse influencing factors and the complex nonlinear patterns exhibited by cold load data in industrial buildings, predicting these loads poses significant challenges. This study proposes a hybrid prediction approach combining the Improved Snake Optimization Algorithm (ISOA), Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD), random forest (RF), and BiLSTM-attention. Initially, the ISOA optimizes the parameters of the VMD method, obtaining the best decomposition results for cold load data. Subsequently, RF is employed to predict components with higher frequencies, while BiLSTM-attention is utilized for components with lower frequencies. The final cold load prediction results are obtained by combining these predictions. The proposed method is validated using actual cold load data from an industrial building, and experimental results demonstrate its excellent predictive performance, making it more suitable for cold load prediction in industrial constructions compared to traditional methods. By enhancing the accuracy of cold load predictions. This approach not only improves the energy efficiency of industrial buildings but also promotes the reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions, thus contributing to the sustainable development of the industrial sector.