Within the suburbs of northeast Paris, there’s a large terra-cotta-colored warehouse with a labyrinth of windowless corridors inside. A deafening whir emanates from behind rows and rows of nameless grey doorways, and underneath white striplights, disposable earbuds can be found to guard passersby from the noise.
These are the uncanny innards of considered one of France’s latest knowledge facilities, accomplished earlier this 12 months, which is now getting used to warmth the brand new Olympic Aquatics Center—seen from the information middle’s roof. When US swimming star Katie Ledecky received her ninth Olympic gold medal final week, she did it by dashing by way of water heated, at the least partly, by the information middle’s equipment.
Referred to as PA10, this noisy website belongs to the American knowledge middle firm Equinix—the whirring sound is the corporate’s cooling methods attempting to decrease the temperature of its purchasers’ laptop servers. “PA10 is very made for high-density racks,” says the positioning’s knowledge middle engineer Imane Erraji, pointing to a tower of servers able to coaching AI.
For the previous month, the information middle has turned its sizzling air waste into water and piped it to a neighborhood power system run by French utility firm Engie. As soon as it runs at full capability, Equinix expects to export 6.6 thermal megawatts of warmth out of the constructing—the equal of greater than 1,000 houses.
As projections recommend AI is about to turbocharge the quantity of electrical energy knowledge facilities want—Equinix predicts energy consumption per rack might rise by as a lot as 400 %—PA10 displays a European phenomenon whereby officers try to mitigate the environmental influence of the coming AI energy crunch and rework knowledge facilities into a part of the infrastructure maintaining cities heat.
Erraji describes the challenge as a “win-win state of affairs” for each Equinix and the native suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can pipe the warmth out of the constructing so its cooling units don’t must work so laborious, she explains, whereas town will get an affordable supply of warmth produced domestically. After the challenge obtained a €2 million ($2.1 million) funding from town of Paris, Equinix has dedicated to offering the power free-of-charge for 15 years. In June, the mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, Mathieu Hanotin, also called attention to the environmental advantages, claiming that utilizing the information middle as an power supply will spare the area 1,800 metric tons of CO2 emissions per 12 months.
But France has a “very low-carbon electrical energy combine,” in response to the Worldwide Power Company (IEA), with 62 percent of its electrical energy generated by nuclear energy. And critics say multiplying heat-reuse initiatives are a distraction from the true challenge: the quantity of land, water, and electrical energy knowledge facilities eat. “When the information facilities are already right here, in fact it is higher to reuse the warmth than do nothing,” says Anne-Laure Ligozat, laptop science professor at France’s Nationwide Faculty of Laptop Science for Business and Enterprise (ENSIIE). “However the issue is the variety of knowledge facilities and their power consumption.” There could be much less of an environmental influence to to have a primary electrical energy heating system with out the information middle, she provides.
