The Potential to Use Waste Heat from Data Centers to Heat Homes – GreenBuildingAdvisor

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Hyperscale data centers are a growing market, but field trials using “edge” data centers in homes offer promise.

If you’ve seen the latest GDP figures, then you’ve also probably seen data that correlates recent U.S. economic growth with the continued ascendance of generative AI. Investments in artificial intelligence tools are booming, as evidenced by more than half the country using them in some form in the last year, according to figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. On a macro scale, the rapid pace of new data centers getting built across the country—some 1,240 data centers were built or approved for construction in the U.S. by the end of 2024, with no state in the lower 48 left untouched—represents an outsized contributor to GDP growth. “The U.S. economy in 2025 is split in two: Everything tied to artificial intelligence is booming. Just about everything else is not,” read a recent New York Times assessment.

Without getting into the specifics of what’s powering these energy-hungry behemoths (some estimates reveal that a single data center consumes more electricity that some cities), there is a lot of warranted attention being paid to what becomes of all the heat they generate. The recoverable waste heat from operable data centers is roughly enough to heat 100,000 homes, according to 2020 data. Some solutions have emerged in recent years, like connecting data centers to district heating systems or thermal batteries such as Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) networks. A similar development in Helsinki that’s been making headlines involves an underground data center that is channeling server heat back to the city’s grid and being used to heat about 500 homes.

Big solutions on a small scale

Another budding option involves reducing the size of data centers (by a lot!), to the point where they can be installed in a private shed or backyard, with waste heat being redirected for…