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If you've ever played on a gaming PC in a small room, you know that electronics spit

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out a ton of heat, but what if it wasn't going to waste and you could actually use

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it to heat the rest of your house? Sounds like a great idea, especially with how high heating bills have gotten in many

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parts of the world. It turns out there are places that do this on a large scale, so forget about sticking

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your computer in your bedroom and just running Furmark on a cold night.

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I'm talking about huge data centers which generate so much waste heat that they can

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heat thousands of homes. Although projects like this can be found worldwide, they're perhaps most common in northern Europe,

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which makes sense as Scandinavia isn't exactly known for warm beaches.

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Good people, though. The general way this works is that cold water is pumped into data centers to cool the air

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surrounding the server racks. This can be done in several ways, but it's common to see hot air from the servers forced

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through the chilled water with a fan. As a result, the water warms up and leaves the facility, but instead of going to some

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sewer somewhere, it goes to the city's heating grid.

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In parts of Scandinavia, homes are heated with water-filled radiators, meaning that

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this warm water can just be pumped directly into them from the central system and returned

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to the grid afterward to be heated up again. In fact, because data centers generate so much waste heat, the EU is considering bringing

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in a regulation that would require excess heat recovery from data centers that use more

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than 1 megawatt of power. It remains to be seen whether this will indeed end up being a Europe-wide requirement, but

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countries are already using other means to get the companies that run data centers to

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do something worthwhile with their waste heat. As is the case with most projects involving a business doing something for the common

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good, waste heat reclamation isn't something corporations are doing solely out of the kindness

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of their hearts. For example, data centers in Stockholm get compensated for the waste heat they sell and

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the local energy provider actually gives them chilled water to cool things off with in the

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first place. Meanwhile, in Denmark, the government has gotten rid of a pre-existing tax on data centers

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that generate excessive amounts of heat to incentivize them to instead make a lot of heat

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and then distribute that waste heat back to the grid.

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And in Germany, a law is already in place that requires a full 40% of waste heat to be reused

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for data centers that open in 2027 or later.

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But exactly how impactful will these programs and requirements be?

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Well, there are some pros and cons to heating actual homes this way.

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You need the right infrastructure to support an actual heating grid, which would be alongside

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your other things like municipal electrical grids. Additionally, the waste heat that comes out of the data centers usually isn't all that

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hot. Sometimes it's as low as 80 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that more energy sometimes needs to

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be added to get it up to the temperature needed for heating buildings.

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And even then, it still may not be warm enough to heat anything other than homes.

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That being said, the actual number of homes this technology could benefit is significant.

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You can actually heat around 20,000 average apartments with only 10 megawatts of power.

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To put this into more concrete terms, one single data park in Stockholm expects to be

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able to heat one-tenth of the entire city of Stockholm by 2035.

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And although Northern Europe seems to be leading the way in this trend, we're seeing similar

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projects in the US, Canada, France, the UK, and Switzerland.

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So as our reliance on cloud computing and AI grows, more and more people may find it

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easier and cheaper than ever to stay warm in winter, though that doesn't really say

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much about the other consequences we might face.

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So thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with

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your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.