DCD
Summary
Before you build your data center, you need to decide where to build it. Tax breaks are probably one of the most powerful incentives to choose one location over another, along with the availability of fiber and electricity - preferably cheap, green electricity.
But there’s another factor to consider. Data centers don’t exist in isolation. They have needs for services like water and cooling, and there are other industrial sites that actually have complementary needs.
Place your facility near certain kinds of infrastructure and there’s a win-win situation. Some of these friendly sites are exotic, some are simply practical. Here are some ideas:
Housing
We’ve suggested some quite exotic sites to put data centers, but there’s also a major opportunity in developing alongside the most basic type of buildings: housing.
Here is the idea: data centers in cities can give (or sell) their waste heat to warm up surrounding homes and office buildings. The energy used in the data center gets used twice, and the city can turn off some fossil-powered heating, reducing its footprint.
The concept has taken off slowly, but some data centers are putting it into practice in Scandinavian countries like Denmark and Sweden, which have a low enough temperature for heating to be needed for many months of the year, and a lot of government-installed district heating systems to deliver the waste heat to customers.
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