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mrexroad 12 hours ago

> This "waste heat" system is a closed loop of efficiency. The 60+ kilowatts of heat energy produced by a storage cluster is not a byproduct to be eliminated but a resource to be harvested.

Are there any other data centers harvesting waste heat for benefit?

cloud-oak 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The EU mandates that all large data centres built/commissioned from July this year will make use of waste heat:

https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/rechenzent...

londons_explore 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

Sounds like part of the reason all the biggest AI data centers are being built outside the EU...

Dr4kn 14 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's more like there are a lot of building restrictions and fines. Overloading the local power systems. Building illegal turbines.

If you can get paid on your waste heat why wouldn't you like that?

fragmede 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

"can" and "must" are two different situations.

miduil 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, plenty - sometimes data centers are built together with apartment or office complexes for this particular purpose. Unfortunately that already pinpoints the core limitation, due to the low-temperature of the data centers. The higher the temperature difference is, the more affective heating becomes - with air cooled systems it requires preparation to ensure that can be used for heating.

Also data centers need physical space, and often - you need heating where there is not a lot of space (cities), and for "district heating" you need higher temperatures usually.

stanac 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yandex had a data center in Finland,, not sure if it's still operational. It was heating 1500 homes with 4 MW.

https://www.euroheat.org/dhc/knowledge-hub/datacentre-suppli...

bilegeek 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Several swimming pools do to great effect:

https://datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/excess-data-cent...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64939558

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/free-...

stingraycharles 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know that ~ 15 years ago we were already using datacenters in The Netherlands that were used to heat houses in a city.

I do vaguely remember that the economics of it all were not great, but it’s definitely a thing for quite a while already.

12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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