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Summary
Data centers—and the AI boom they’re being built to meet demand for—are on track to more than double electricity use by 2030 to 945 TWh, the International Energy Agency estimates. AI is the biggest driver of the monumental increase in energy demand, which would be just under 3 percent of global power demand in 2030. But data centers put out a lot of heat, up to 50kW per rack in the GPU-intensive facilities—each rack more than enough to heat a home. Usually that heat goes to waste.
However, recovering waste heat from data centers could help tackle the energy crisis. The question is whether industry can move fast enough to capture it at scale.
Across Europe and beyond, utilities, operators and startups are trying to turn that liability into a resource.
In Denmark, Meta’s Odense campus routes server heat into the city’s district network, with Fjernvarme Fyn and engineering partner Ramboll heating thousands of homes with around 100,000MWh of recovered energy a year. In Ireland, South Dublin County Council’s Tallaght District Heating Scheme takes waste heat from a nearby AWS facility and supplies it to civic buildings and apartments.
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