Data Centers & District Energy

Power Summary Data centers release nearly all the electricity they consume as low-grade heat, representing a significant untapped energy potential. When harnessed with heat pumps, this heat can be upgraded for use in district and industrial heating applications. This concept is not theoretical. Successful, large-scale heat recovery systems are already implemented in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. The 25-MW Nebius data center in Mäntsälä, Finland, recovers enough energy to heat the equivalent of 2,500 homes. In the U.S., where winters are milder, the potential is even greater—a single hyperscale facility could heat up to 20,000 homes. Successful domestic pilot projects include the National Laboratory of the Rockies’ campus in Golden, Colorado, and Amazon’s Seattle, Washington, headquarters. This solution also addresses the massive upcoming challenge of heating electrification. With an increasing number of jurisdictions mandating all-electric heating, utilities face yet another surge in electrical consumption. Water-source heat pumps in thermal networks offer higher efficiencies, more stable performance, and reduced winter peak demands compared to air-source and ground-source heat pumps. Waste-heat integration can help accelerate decarbonization while simultaneously creating a new revenue stream for utilities. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter #DistrictHeating #DistrictEnergy

Huawei Summary How will cities cope with the surging power demand due to data centers? Susanna Kass: The keys are to shift data centers from fossil-based power to clean energy, and to recover and re-use heat waste so that it becomes a resource, rather than a byproduct. Data centers run 24 hours a day, and their cooling systems continuously generate warm water that can be captured and pumped through underground pipes to serve nearby buildings such as offices, residences, or factories. This "district heating" approach is already well established in the Nordic countries. It serves about 40% of the roughly 100,000 homes in Espoo, Finland, a city near Helsinki. In Sweden, facilities south of Stockholm feed recovered heat waste into systems serving about 100,000 homes. These cities are turning heat waste from data servers into a primary energy source. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter #DistrictHeating

Technical.ly Summary A University of Maryland professor won a first-of-its-kind pitch competition for a new way to deal with heat generated by data centers. Damena Agonafer developed his approach via the Vicinity Ideation Program, a partnership between Boston-based Vicinity Energy and the Maryland Energy Innovation Accelerator to spur new approaches to clean heating and urban decarbonization. At its culminating event on Friday, Agonafer took the top prize for his tech that captures waste heat from data centers and redirects it to warm local communities. Vicinity Energy is a Boston-based energy company that provides heating and cooling in cities across the country. Though the competition did not carry a cash prize, Vicinity plans to keep collaborating with Agonafer as his research moves forward, CEO Kevin Hagerty said. Continue Reading #News #MemberNewsIDEA #VicinityEnergy #DataCenters #DataCenter #DistrictEnergy

CNBC Summary Amid the AI boom, hyperscalers and governments are looking for ways to repurpose excess heat from data centers. CNBC's April Roach has been looking into how the power-hungry facilities are increasingly being integrated with local district heating networks. #News #DataCenter #DistrictEnergy

EdScoop Summary The Technological University of Dublin’s Tallaght campus is using the excess heat from a nearby Amazon Web Services data center to warm its students. The Irish university has been using the excess heat in its own heating and ventilation system since 2023, CNBC reported. According to one expert, this manner of heat exchange is not especially cost-effective, but the heat would go to waste if the university did not used it. According to the International District Energy Association, similar heat systems can be found in 165 supermarkets across Europe, most of them in Denmark. The stores’ refrigerators reportedly channel heat back into their facilities’ heating vents. Continue Reading #News #DistrictEnergy #DataCenter

Maeil Summary SGC Energy is planning a 300 megawatt (MW) artificial intelligence (AI) data center project in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province. The company aims to go beyond its role as a district energy provider by directly participating in investment and infrastructure construction to enhance the project’s completeness. The AI data center will be built within Gunsan National Industrial Complex 2 on a site of about 115,000 square meters, or roughly 35,000 pyeong. The first phase will be a 40 MW modular data center, with construction starting by the end of this year and operations scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2028. The facility will then be expanded in stages to a total capacity of 300 MW. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

New Civil Engineer Summary The European Investment Bank (EIB) has appointed engineering and design firm Cowi to advise the Irish government on a nationwide strategy for district heating, a move intended to underpin as much as €4bn (£3.5bn) of infrastructure investment by 2035. The advisory mandate, commissioned through the EIB’s InvestEU Advisory Hub, tasks Cowi with producing an investment and implementation plan for district heating across Ireland with a particular focus on Dublin and Cork. The work is being carried out in partnership with the Department of Climate, Energy & Environment (DCEE) and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI). Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

engineering.com Summary The company raised a $20M Series A in September 2025 and says the water-free platform supports heat reuse for power or district heating. Karman Industries announced the launch of the Heat Processing Unit (HPU), a modular 10MW integrated thermal platform engineered to solve the “speed-to-power” crisis facing AI hyperscalers. By consolidating massive heat management infrastructure into high-density modular packages, Karman’s HPU unlocks rapid deployments while eliminating water consumption. HPUs optimize energy consumption, providing the most efficient cooling while unlocking heat reuse for power generation or district heating. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

CNBC Summary Students at a tech university in Dublin are enjoying an unexpected perk of artificial intelligence — it’s helping heat their campus. Since 2023, the Technical 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 centre. Data centres 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 centres 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. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter #DistrictHeating

Envirotec Summary Projected growth in data centres will produce enough waste heat to warm millions of homes in the UK by 2035 – if the infrastructure is in place to take advantage of it, according to new research. The analysis comes from EnergiRaven, a UK company with expertise in waste heat, and Viegand Maagøe, a consulting firm that advises on ESG and sustainability. What’s needed to capitalise on this major source of low-cost home heating are the “heat highways” needed to capture waste heat from the next generation of data centres. The research appears to show that these facilities could supply enough heat for at least 3.5 million homes by 2035. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

Johnson Controls Summary Driven by regulation, cost pressures and resource constraints, today’s operators are regularly being tasked to do more with less. In a reality where only 35-50% of the input fuel is converted into electricity, and the rest is released into the atmosphere, there is a massive opportunity for operators to take advantage and find better and more strategic ways to utilize waste heat. That’s where absorption chillers and the technology behind them enter the picture. In the European Union, heat export mandates are beginning to require waste heat reuse, and this shift is already leading to projects where the warmth from servers is piped into district heating grids. Even in regions without such requirements, the economic and environmental benefits are prompting wider adoption – especially in situations where grid electricity is constrained or water is scarce. This has brought attention to absorption chillers and the technology behind them. “Absorption chillers can be driven by waste heat from combined heat and power (CHP) systems, providing beneficial cooling to the data centers,” says Rajesh Dixit, Senior Director, Global Product Management, Building Technologies & Solutions, Johnson Controls. “The heat of rejection from the absorption cycle can be rejected to dry coolers, which means no water loss. In a futuristic scenario, absorption heat pumps may be serving the cooling needs of the data center, and the heat of rejection of the cycle can be ...

WVNews Summary Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s efforts to expand the use of microgrids through his Power Generation and Consumption Act is a smart move for a state well-known for its power-generating resources. The current law allows for only two microgrids and requires the partial use of renewable energy. Morrisey’s plan would expand the number of microgrids and eliminate the mandatory use of renewable energy. Morrisey says the expansion of microgrids will make West Virginia more attractive to data centers. While that use is a driving factor, the increasing demand for power as technology evolves makes this plan especially timely. Continue Reading #News #Microgrids #DataCenter

Data Center News Summary Canada stands at a pivotal moment in its AI strategy. 2025 saw a lot of positive momentum and now in 2026, we need to take the next steps in shifting the strategy from theory to application. Success requires urgent action and collaboration from government, private sector and local communities to ensure digital infrastructure is secure, sovereign, and creating local impact. As data centres become critical infrastructure, smart management of energy and water must mitigate environmental impact while advancing Canada's AI strategy. A national playbook - co‑developed with utilities, municipalities and district‑energy operators - should standardize heat‑reuse readiness, liquid‑cooling readiness, alternative water sourcing and metering. Equinix's TR5 in Markham already exports waste heat via Markham District Energy, proving viability in Canadian climates but industry-wide adoption is needed. Continue Reading #MemberNewsIDEA #News #DistrictEnergy #DataCenter

tovima.com Summary As Greece accelerates its energy transition, PPC’s investment program in Western Macedonia is moving from planning to execution. Over the coming months, the group is set to complete renewable energy projects totaling 2 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity, either fully or partially owned by PPC. At the same time, the construction of electricity storage facilities with a combined capacity of 150 megawatts (MW) is underway, strengthening system flexibility as renewable generation expands. A cornerstone of PPC’s strategy is the development of a large-scale data center on the site of the former Agios Dimitrios lignite power plant, one of the largest such facilities in Greece. Preparatory studies are ongoing and the project is progressing through the permitting phase, positioning it as a flagship investment in the region’s post-coal era. Continue Reading #News #CHP #DataCenter

yahoo! news Summary The rapid growth of artificial intelligence has sharply increased electricity and water consumption, raising concerns about the technology’s environmental footprint and carbon emissions. But the story is more complicated than that. I study emerging technologies and how their development and deployment influence economic, institutional, and societal outcomes, including environmental sustainability. From my research, I see that even as AI uses a lot of energy, it can also make systems cleaner and smarter. The energy needed to heat, cool, and power buildings is responsible for roughly 28 percent of total global emissions. AI initiatives are starting to reduce building emissions through smart management and predictive optimization. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

Logistics Middle East Summary The UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure has signed a MoU with Agility to advance energy efficiency and operational performance across data centres and district cooling systems nationwide. Announced in Abu Dhabi, the agreement focuses on deploying artificial intelligence driven control technologies to manage rising energy and cooling demands linked to the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence applications. The initiative supports national efforts to prepare infrastructure for increasingly dense computing workloads while improving cost efficiency and resilience. Continue Reading #News

DCD Summary OpenAI has unveiled a new initiative to help prevent rising electricity costs in the regions where it is building its Stargate data center projects. Dubbed the Stargate Community plan, in a blog post , the AI giant stated: “Across all of our Stargate Community plans, we commit to paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don’t increase your electricity prices.” The company noted that the plan would be tailored to each community and region in which it operates, given the unique energy and grid conditions in each location In Michigan, its development partners, Oracle and Related Digital, have partnered with local utility DTE Energy to secure power for the state's Stargate project using existing generation resources, augmented by a new battery storage investment financed entirely by the project. According to the companies, the agreement is designed to ensure there is no impact on DTE’s existing customer base. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter #DTEEnergyServices #MemberNewsIDEA

Enlit Summary In the next ten years, the UK will experience a major digital infrastructure shift as installed datacentre capacity is rapidly expanded. The government’s commitment to datacentres is now taking precedence over other elements of the industrial transition. For example, a planned green hydrogen project in Teesside has been set aside in favour of a large datacentre. Many places have integrated data centres into heat networks. Heat exchangers transfer the waste heat to district heat networks in large population centres, where each connected dwelling features a boiler-sized heat interface unit (HIU) that transfers the supplied hot water into its space and water heating systems. Some of the best examples of this in action are to be found in the Nordic countries, where every available source of waste heat is utilised to help endue bitter winters. Google’s Hamina data centre in Finland, for example, provides for 80% of the annual heat demand of the town via the local district heating network. Continue Reading #News #CHP #DataCenter

IDEA is pleased to announce the publication of a new interactive program for our CampusEnergy2026 conference, coming to Washington, D.C. in February. Learning is a journey, and this February on the banks of the Potomac, just south of Washington, D.C., your next one begins. You may have heard that CampusEnergy2026 is our biggest and most comprehensive educational program ever, featuring more than 140 podium and poster sessions, more than 250 industry experts, and three pre-conference workshops on Thermal Energy Networks (TENS), District Energy & Data Centers, and Thermal Distribution & Operations. Now you can explore the educational program in greater detail with the CampusEnergy2026 Interactive Agenda , featuring an expanded look at the sessions, topics and speakers that will shape your learning experience as you make plans to join us at the National Harbor Resort & Convention Center near Washington, D.C., February 17-20. With the CampusEnergy2026 Interactive Agenda , you can explore the full program by day or use the built-in search and filter tools to quickly find topics, speakers, or session types that match your interests. Best of all, you can click into any session for full details including session abstract, presenters, date and time. Click here to see the full range of technical operational and policy topics on the menu, including: Decarbonizing at Campus Scale The Convergence of Data Centers + District Energy Geothermal ...

George Mason University Summary George Mason University is taking a major step toward advancing clean energy and digital infrastructure innovation with the launch of the Virginia AI Data Center Research Lab at Mason Square in Arlington. This initiative is made possible through funding from the Virginia Clean Energy Innovation Bank and Virginia Energy. The $1.5 million grant establishes a first-of-its-kind research and workforce development initiative and positions the commonwealth as the national leader in grid-interactive, AI-driven digital infrastructure. Continue Reading George Mason secures $1.5M to launch cutting-edge AI data center research lab #News #DataCenter

KCUR NPR Summary A data center in the Crossroads is using the clean energy loan for its chilling equipment. Supporters hope that the loans will encourage the projects to be more environmentally friendly. Critics want the city to do more to regulate the developments. The green glass building at 1601 McGee towers over the Crossroads. It has sat empty since 2019, when the Kansas City Star closed its printing press there, and was once the Royals’ preference for a downtown ballpark. The loan will be used as financing to optimize the company’s HVAC system, which cools the data center load. That change should reduce the amount of electricity the center consumes over the 20 years of the loan agreement. “It is unclear how its (Patmos’) energy and water needs will impact others who are connected to the downtown district energy system,” Sadowski said. “I am glad to see the KC Star building utilized, but the Crossroads is an important neighborhood for our city, and we need to make sure surrounding residents and businesses are not harmed by this development.” Continue Reading #News #DataCenter

DCD Summary Germany's Dresden University of Technology (TUD) is planning to deploy a new supercomputer from Atos/Eviden at its Center for Information Services and High-Performance Computing (ZIH). The new supercomputer will be housed at the university’s Lehmann Center data center at Lehmann Zentrum Rechenzentrum and is expected to go into operation in the fourth quarter of 2026, TUD said in a statement. Like its predecessors, Capella and Barnard, Deneb’s water cooling system will allow 97 percent of the heat generated to be reused to heat nearby buildings or feed into the district heating network. Continue Reading #News #DistrictHeating #DataCenter

Michigan Live Summary The British company Deep Green wants to build a data center in downtown Lansing on the site of two seldom-used municipal parking lots, across the street from a Wendy’s and an oil change place and the Lansing Board of Water and Light’s John F. Dye Water Conditioning Plant. At 24 megawatts, it would use roughly the same amount of power as a small city. But the massive amounts of heat that the data center would produce would serve a second function, heating water for a municipal heating system that serves much of Lansing’s downtown, including a General Motors plant, state of Michigan office buildings and Lansing Community College. The company is billing the project as “a different kind of data center,” and it would be, relative to what’s being proposed and built in the United States. Lee said the company believes this would be the first data center in the U.S. built to recycle the heat it generates into a municipal heating system. Continue Reading #News #MemberNewsIDEA #DataCenter #DistrictEnergy #LansingBoardofWaterandLight #Content

DCD Summary Norwegian data center firm Asp Data Center has partnered with Norwegian utility Lyse to integrate district cooling and heat recovery at its data center in Forus, near Stavanger, Norway. As part of the partnership, Lyse will supply up to 3MW of district cooling services to Asp’s Forus facility, while excess heat from the data center will be supplied into the utility’s district heating network. According to the partners, the proximity of Lyse’s existing infrastructure at Forus makes the heat reuse system technically viable, while access to district cooling reduces the need for traditional cooling systems and associated noise from air-based cooling units. Continue Reading #News #DistrictCooling #DataCenter

Brandsit Summary As recently as two years ago, at the height of AI fever in 2024, there was only one question being asked in boardrooms: ‘Where to get Nvidia processors?’ Chip availability was the bottleneck that dictated the pace of technological development. Today, in January 2026, the situation has changed dramatically. Hardware supply chains have cleared, distributors’ warehouses are full of the latest Blackwell and Ruby chips. Yet new data centre investment is stalling. The question of 2026 is no longer “Do you have the equipment?”, but “Where will you connect it?”. Power Availability has replaced silicon availability as the main operational risk factor. We are entering an era where the success of an AI project is determined by the old analogue power infrastructure rather than digital code. This change is driven not only by physics, but also by EU regulations (EED – Energy Efficiency Directive). Liquid cooling is much more energy efficient and, moreover, allows heat recovery. The fluid leaving the server has a temperature of 60-70°C, which allows the Data Centre to be plugged directly into the municipal district heating network. In 2026, server rooms become de facto digital combined heat and power (CHP) plants, heating office buildings and housing estates, which is key to obtaining environmental permits. Continue Reading #News #DataCenter #CHP