Europe Taps Tech's Power-Hungry Data Centers To Heat Homes

With an energy crisis hitting Europe, governments are exploring ways to recycle electricity used on social-media scrolling, conference calls and video streaming to help heat homes and offices. From a report: Electricity-hungry data centers are seeing huge growth in usage, leading to pressure from European officials to funnel the excess heat generated by their computer chips into municipal heating networks. After years of discussions about putting residual heat to work rather than simply venting it outdoors, more such projects are becoming a reality. In the last year, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have started connecting, or announced plans to connect, major data centers to district heating systems in Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Alphabet's Google says it is assessing opportunities to recover heat from its data centers across Europe.

Meta Platforms has been recovering excess heat from its data center in Odense, Denmark, since 2020. The Facebook parent is currently expanding that base, with plans to provide enough excess heat to warm about 11,000 homes as of next year. Other data-center operators are providing heat to networks, particularly in Northern Europe, including Equinix, which is expanding its district heating project in Helsinki, and working on new ones in Germany and other countries. In the Netherlands, there are 10 data centers already supplying heat, and another 15 projects being built or researched, according to the Dutch Data Center Association, a trade group. Higher energy prices, stemming from Russia's decision to effectively cut off natural-gas deliveries following its invasion of Ukraine, have boosted the financial incentive for tech companies to invest in systems necessary to sell off their excess heat, energy and tech sector officials say.

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