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As Europe swelters in a heatwave, residents probably don't want to hear about ways to make their homes even hotter, but that's what Polish property developer Citylink is talking about, with plans to dump waste heat from a new data center in Wroclaw into the municipal district heating network.
Citylink is designing the data center so that heat from servers can be recovered instead of being dissipated via cooling systems — and as the data center grows, any increase in computing power will mean more energy available for recovery.
The collaboration with local power company Kogeneracja will provide "valuable experience in designing and operating modern data centers, with a particular focus on infrastructure dedicated to AI nodes," said Michal Starybrat, development director at Citylink.
"The dynamic growth of the artificial intelligence and cloud technology markets generates unprecedented demand for computing power, this collaboration demonstrates how modern digital infrastructure can actively contribute to building the energy ecosystem of the future," he added.
This type of initiative is not new. There have been similar projects in the UK and
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As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.
The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.
This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.
Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy's downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW
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