Source: The Register: Biting the hand that feeds
The UK government is allocating millions to capture thermal exhaust from data centers and distribute it through district heating networks—including an ambitious tunnel project under the Thames—treating computing infrastructure as distributed thermal utilities rather than isolated facilities. This reframes the economic relationship between hyperscalers and local communities: instead of just consuming power and real estate, data centers become heat suppliers to residential grids, creating infrastructure interdependencies that could accelerate both deployment of new facilities and densification around them. Data center waste heat is abundant, continuous, and currently dissipated; making it economically valuable forces a recalculation of where computation belongs geographically.