From CNBC, January 27:
- AI’s energy problem may also be its solution, as hyperscalers and governments are increasingly exploring opportunities to repurpose excess heat from data centers.
- An Amazon Web Services data center in Dublin currently provides 92% of a technological campus’ heating demand.
- Advances in the technology that keep AI chips cool in data centers are making this all possible; however, high capex costs and lack of infrastructure could slow implementation in Europe.
Students at a tech university in Dublin are enjoying an unexpected perk of artificial intelligence — it’s helping heat their campus.
Since 2023, the Technological University of Dublin’s Tallaght campus has been one of a growing number of buildings in the southwest suburban area of the city to be heated by waste heat from a nearby Amazon Web Services data center.
Data centers have always generated excess heat, but integration with district heating networks has been slow, as the waste heat produced by these power-hungry facilities is typically too low-temperature to directly warm other buildings.
That’s now changing. As the AI boom gets underway and data centers are increasingly filled with racks of advanced chips that require as much as triple the computing capacity of before, operators have had to find new ways to balance maximizing efficiency without sacrificing sustainability.
AI is the “twist” that makes it more attractive, according to Adam Fabricius, commercial manager at heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment provider Sav Systems, and a researcher of heat networks for its sister company EnergiRaven.
“The exciting thing is that AI can give you higher temperatures, and the water cooling makes it a lot easier. You need a lot less hardware to connect these systems,” he told CNBC.
Providing heat to a district heating network gives data centers “additional social license,” the International Energy Agency’s Brendan Reidenbach told CNBC.
“It may not be ultimately very cost effective on paper, but it does contribute to that good social impact by turning what is a potential bad news story of increased data centers into a good-news story of what is ultimately decarbonized heat supply. So it’s very much a win-win situation,” he added.
Ireland a ‘blank slate’
There has been a fair uptake among Big Tech. Microsoft announced plans to fuel the Høje-Taastrup district heating network in Denmark; an Equinix data center heats 1,000 homes in Paris; and Google announced a major heat recovery project at its facility in Hamina, Finland....
....MUCH MORE
And that's why the capital's been Dublin for years.(sorry, old joke)
We saw this with do-it-yourself bitcoin miners in the twenty-teens:
Heat Your House Mining Bitcoin!
And on the power-production end of things, combined-heat-and power systems/co-generation have been in use for generations; going back to Edison's Pearl Street Station.
