In the northeastern suburbs of Paris lies a giant terracotta-coloured warehouse, with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening hum emanates from behind rows and rows of anonymous grey doors, and beneath white lights, disposable headphones are placed to shield passersby from the noise.
These are the mysterious insides of one of France’s newest data centers, completed earlier this year, which is now being used to heat the new Olympic Aquatics Centre—visible from the roof of the data center. When American swimming star Katie Ledecky won her ninth Olympic gold medal last week, she did so by sprinting through water heated, at least in part, by the data center’s machinery.
This noisy centre, known as PA10, belongs to the American data centre company Equinix. The hum is caused by the company’s cooling systems, which try to reduce the temperature of its clients’ computing servers. “PA10 is specially designed for high-density racks,” says the centre’s data centre engineer, Imane Erraji, pointing to a tower of servers capable of training AI.
Over the past month, the data center has been converting its hot air waste into water and piped it to a local power system run by a French utility. EngieOnce operating at full capacity, Equinix expects to export 6.6 megawatts of thermal heat from the building, the equivalent of more than 1,000 homes.
As projections suggest, AI is on the verge of… turbocharger the amount of electricity data centers need (Equinix predicts that power consumption per rack could increase by as much as 400 percent) – PA10 reflects a European phenomenon by which officials are trying to mitigate the environmental impact of the coming AI energy crisis and transform data centers into part of the infrastructure that keeps cities warm.
Erraji describes the project as a “win-win situation” for both Equinix and the local suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can channel heat outside the building so its cooling devices don’t have to work as hard, he explains, while the city gets a cheap source of locally produced heat. After the project received a grant 2 million euros With a $2.1 million investment from the city of Paris, Equinix has committed to providing energy free of charge for 15 years. In June, the mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, Also called attention In terms of environmental benefits, it said that using the data centre as a power source will save the region 1,800 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.
However, France has a “very low-carbon electricity mix,” according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with 62 percent 100% of the electricity generated by nuclear power. Critics say the proliferation of heat-reusing projects distracts from the real problem: the amount of land, water and electricity consumed by data centres. “When data centres are already here, of course it is better to reuse the heat than to do nothing,” says Anne-Laure Ligozat, a computer science professor at France’s National School of Information Technology for Industry and Commerce (ENSIIE). “But the problem is the number of data centres and their energy consumption.” The environmental impact would be lower if you had a basic electric heating system without the data centre, she adds.
