Post #1205983

2026-04-16 19:58 UTC

Anyone ever heard of these folks before? dataglow.energy On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc. I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.

Replies (4)

@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-04-16 23:17

People talked about doing this with bitcoin mining - cnbc.com/…/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-ene… - but I’m not aware of anyone trying to scale it out or turn it into a company.

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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-17 05:28

HEre’s an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes theregister.com/…/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/

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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-04-17 07:58

i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it’s kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some intern student writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there’s less waste heat from CCGT of equal power, and it’s all gone when you switch to renewables, so there’s a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can’t be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won’t be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed project

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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-04-17 07:53

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