https://www.techspot.com/news/97995-data-center-uses-waste-h...
The "data center" produces about 28 kW of heat and the swimming pool has cut its gas bill by 62%. They are saving US$24,000 per year.
- Revenue: $25.01M
- Expenses: $25M
So "small savings" like this can add up for them.
Keeping in mind that the datacenter operator is also paying the power bill for that (which presumably is roughly 28 kW), amounting to something like £65,000/year at current UK rates
Elsewhere, e.g. in London, Docklands is both full of high density data centres and high-end residential buildings and offices that could certain use the waste heat in winter at least.
Most of the data centres there just looks like office buildings on the outside, and most residents won't know they are there.
free hot tub
free publicity and good will gathered
("free")
> The data center delivers up to 1.7 MW of reusable heat – enough enough to warm 6,000 energy-efficient homes in winter or provide 20,000 five-minute showers every day in summer.
https://blog.siemens.com/2026/05/sustainable-data-infomaniak...
https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-inaugurates-a-revo...
(Edited to add: there are several examples of public swimming pools being heated with Low T geothermal heat in the Perth metropolitan region of Western Australia.)
Paris 2024: Excess Data Center Heat Used to Warm Olympic Swimming Pools
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/paris-202...
You mean server.
Air conditioners could do it too, right? Pump heat into a water reservoir instead of just throwing it away?
It's a stainless steel coil that you can put on your A/C and then run water from your pool over it to heat the pool.
[1] https://www.computerwoche.de/article/2690747/rechenzentrum-h...
https://help.abathhouse.com/hc/en-us/articles/16748674443924...
What about running the compute workloads of the municipality instead?
"The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months - our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof," he said.
...
Last summer, BBC News revealed 65 swimming pools had closed since 2019, with rising energy costs cited as a significant reason."
That's terrible that pools are closing. No one even builds new public swimming pools anymore, so it's awful to close the few that exist.
Undisclosed large Swiss private corporate datacenter provides heat to residential complexes in the surrounding area, as well as being integrated with the grid operator and required to spin up generators and island itself on demand, as part of the license to operate.
Many such cases!
Even steel plants which deal with significantly higher waste heat gradients rarely bother with recovering energy.
Do I see a market opening here?
There are uses for low grade heat but they require colocation and careful design, which costs more than just dumping the heat.
For comparison, an IC engine has a Carnot efficiency of something like 80% on paper, but the reality you get is only 20-30%
Landauer's principle says that even if we could build computers to work at those temperatures, they'd need more power anyway.
We can just use data centers for heating too...maybe turn around all these protests against them
But in some cases, a data centre might be too remotely located, or the infrastructure is too lacking to make it economically feasible, which still leaves me wondering why you couldn't try to recuperate at least some of it as electricity on-site...
You need a lot of heat to do anything useful. I would need to run something like 14 kW of servers to heat my home through winter - that's a couple of hundred thousand in hardware at current prices.
Some heat pumps do this. E.g. Panasonic Aquarea EcoFleX. When cooling the house, the domestic hot water tank is used to dump heat into (up to a certain temperature).
(I work there)
Rural land is cheap and there are fewer neighbors to annoy with the 24/7 construction activity.
Presumably you read this very recently, since it's mentioned at the end of the article.
A lot of the thermal energy is not used for electrical generation. Although a small portion actually is -- made possible by the \Delta T rejecting heat at a low annual average atmospheric T.
Most of the rest of the heat is used to run an absorption chiller to maintain the ice "palace" in the summer.
(This info might be slightly outdated. It was true about 2018 or thereabouts when I met the owner of the resort at a geothermal conference.)
https://www.hotspotenergy.com/titanium-pool-heat-exchangers/
Data centers were, and still can be, some of the cleanest industrial facilities - but the ones being built in this AI wave are not, because they are being built as cheaply and as quickly as possible and without regards to proper infrastructure.
That’s every local investigative journalist’s wet dream. Can you link us to a source please?
PS saw an interview with he who shouldn’t be named and they made an interesting point that there isn’t a way to scale the manufacturing of gas turbine blades, there will never be enough gas turbines for these DCs to come online as scheduled.