The Danish city of Odense is not very large — only 200,000 people live there. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that local homes are heated by Meta.
Since 2020, Meta’s massive 50,000 sq m data center in an industrial complex on the outskirts of the city has been channeling warm air from its servers into Odense’s district heating network. It is then distributed to the 100,000 households connected to the system. Meta can directly heat around 11,000 homes.
How do locals feel about this neighborhood? Some complain about the too-bright lights around the perimeter of the data center, others believe that the company should pay more taxes in Denmark. But its contribution to the city's heating system outweighs these disadvantages.
“It’s a really good idea to use heat that would otherwise just Bulk SMS USA disappear into the air,” says Søren Freisleben, a city council member. Would he agree to more data centers in the city if they were also connected to the heating system? “Of course.”
Odense is the first place in the world where Meta has tried to channel excess heat from a data center directly into people’s homes, but it’s not the only tech company pursuing similar ideas. In Ireland, an Amazon data center is already helping to heat Dublin University, and in the southern Finnish city of Espoo, Microsoft is building the world’s largest data center-based heating system.
This trend is expected to grow. The current AI boom has been accompanied by a data center construction frenzy. According to research firm Dell'Oro Group, companies such as Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon will need to invest about $1 trillion in infrastructure to meet the demand for AI computing.
All of these data centers generate a lot of heat. If that heat could be redirected into local homes, the giants could meet their climate change commitments and governments could say they got a good deal by forcing big tech to give something back to the local community.
“Data centers are like giant refrigerators,” explains David Luntz, CEO of Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, a British real estate developer. In November, the company announced a new project in London that will be heated by a nearby data center.
In most cases, the heat produced by these data centers is simply vented into the atmosphere, making it easy to use to heat nearby buildings, Luntz says.
