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On August 7, a data center in Paris, France, was connected to the local heating system to provide heating for Paris.Olympic GamesHowever, critics say these data center heat recovery projects actually divert public attention fromAIConcern about the real environmental cost.

There is a huge reddish-brown warehouse in the northeastern suburbs of Paris. Its interior is a maze of windowless corridors. Behind rows of gray doors comes a deafening hum. This is France's newest data center, which was completed earlier this year and is now used to heat the new Olympic Aquatics Center. In other words, the water in the Olympic swimming pool is heated using the heat generated by the data center.

The hum is coming from the cooling system that keeps computer servers cool at the PA10 data center, owned by Equinix, a U.S. data center company. "PA10 is designed for high-density racks," said Imane Erraji, a data center engineer at the site, pointing to a tower server that can train artificial intelligence. Over the past month, the data center has been converting its hot exhaust into hot water, which is piped to a local heat exchanger operated by French state-run utility Engie.energyAt full capacity, Equinix estimates the data center will output 6.6 megawatts of energy, enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

Predictions show that AI will significantly increase the amount of data center space requiredelectricityEquinix predicts that power consumption per rack could increase by 400%. PA10 showcases local efforts to mitigate the environmental impact of the AI ​​energy crisis and transform data centers into part of the city’s heating infrastructure.

Elage described the project as a "win-win" for Equinix and the Faubourg Seine-Saint-Denis. She explained that Equinix can pipe heat out of the building, effectively reducing the power required to run cooling equipment, while the city gets a cheap source of locally produced heat. The project received a €2 million (US$2.1 million) investment from the city of Paris, and Equinix has pledged to provide the project free of charge for 15 years.Thermal EnergyIn June, Mathieu Hanotin, mayor of Seine-Saint-Denis, also highlighted the environmental benefits of data centers, claiming that using data centers as a source of heat would reduce local carbon dioxide emissions by 1,800 tons per year.

However, France's electricity mix is ​​"already low in carbon emissions", with 62% of its electricity coming from nuclear power, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Critics say the growing number of heat recovery projects distracts from the real problem of data centers consuming land, water and electricity. "When data centers are already there, it's better to recover this heat than to do nothing," said Anne-Laure Ligozat, a professor of computer science at France's National School of Computer Science for Industry and Commerce (ENSIIE). "But the problem is the number of data centers and the energy consumption." She added that if there were no data centers, a purely electric heating system would have a smaller impact on the environment.

Data centers have come under increasing pressure recently to help the European Union meet ambitious environmental targets, such as reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, said Simon Hinterholzer, a researcher at Germany's Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. As a result, projects to recycle heat to heat homes, offices or universities have sprung up across the region. These projects have become more popular in the past two years as energy prices have soared in Europe and local governments have been looking for cheap heat sources.

Once a data center is built, researchers agree, these heat recovery projects make sense. “It makes a significant difference,” said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies sustainable computing. He estimates that cooling technology can account for 50% of a data center’s total energy consumption. “If companies can repurpose that heat, they’re actually significantly reducing the energy needed for cooling.”

However, in order to promote the benefits of heat recovery projects, the sources of power for data centers must be carefully examined. Equinix said that PA10's energy needs are 100% "covered" by renewable energy, including the use of power purchase agreements (PPAs), which is when the tech company pays for the equivalent power produced by wind or solar farms, but that power is not necessarily used directly by the data center.

“There are no data centers that run entirely on renewable energy,” said Shaolei Ren. “When tech companies claim their data centers are powered by renewable energy or are carbon neutral, they are referring to carbon offsets, which means they plug their data centers into the grid and do some offsetting methods elsewhere.” For example, companies that rely on power purchase agreements don’t always buy renewable energy from the country where the data center is located.

For the past nine days, the cheers of the Olympic swimming venue may have drowned out the hum of the nearby Equinix data center. But in Paris, as in the rest of Europe, people remain skeptical about the booming industry and the disruption that artificial intelligence will bring. According to Ligozat, the main issue is the debate over whether data centers should continue to be built and what to use them for. "For me, the main question is, should we continue to build data centers?" she said, "not whether we should recycle the heat generated." (辰辰)