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Students at a tech university in Dublin are enjoying an unexpected perk of artificial intelligence — it's helping heat their campus. Since 2023, the Technological 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 center. Data centers 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 centers 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. AI is the "twist" that makes it more attractive, according to Adam Fabricius, commercial manager at heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment provider Sav Systems, and a researcher of heat networks for its sister company EnergiRaven.
"The exciting thing is that AI can give you higher temperatures, and the water cooling makes it a lot easier. You need a lot less hardware to connect these systems," he told CNBC. Providing heat to a district heating network gives data centers "additional social license," the International Energy Agency's Brendan Reidenbach told CNBC. "It may not be ultimately very cost effective on paper, but it does contribute to that good social impact by turning what is a potential bad news story of increased data centers into a good-news story of what is ultimately decarbonized heat supply. So it's very much a win-win situation," he added.
Ireland a 'blank slate'
There has been a fair uptake among Big Tech. Microsoft announced plans to fuel the Høje-Taastrup district heating network in Denmark; an Equinix data center heats 1,000 homes in Paris; and Google announced a major heat recovery project at its facility in Hamina, Finland. Ireland was one of two European countries to enforce a moratorium on new data center applications as the power-hungry facilities strained Dublin's grid, consuming 22% of the small country's power in 2024. Ireland eventually eased its moratorium late last year as the AI boom saw sentiment U-turn on the economic potential of the facilities.
Ireland is "effectively a blank slate," as the country has not had a district heating system before, said the IEA's Reidenbach. The Tallaght scheme shows the benefits of integrated planning because it brings together the power system operator and the distribution grid operator, he said. In 2020, local government formed Ireland's first not-for-profit energy utility, Heat Works. Waste heat from the nearby AWS data center supplies 100% of the heat to the network. "While we are only in the second year of monitoring, we have evidence that the project has limited our exposure to market price shocks generally," Rosie Webb, head of decarbonization at TU Dublin, told CNBC via email. The campus abated around 704 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024 despite the additional energy demand from two new buildings being added to the site, according to TU Dublin's calculations. AWS' data center in Tallaght offers a "unique opportunity" to reuse heat, according to the company's country lead Niamh Gallagher. The scheme, which sees AWS provide recycled heat free of charge, was initially planned to heat 55,000 square meters of public buildings, an area three times the size of the city's Croke Park stadium pitch, as well as commercial space and 133 apartments. "It's a win-win when we can identify a special project that uses our infrastructure to support the climate goals of the community," Gallagher told CNBC.
Keeping hot chips cool
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