Søren Freiesleben has lived in Odense his entire life. He likes the historic Danish city for its size. It’s not too big—just 200,000 people live there—and he never feels like he’s drowning in crowds. So far so normal. But there is something unusual about Odense: Its homes are heated by the social giant Meta.
Since 2020, Meta’s hyperscale data center—spanning 50,000 square meters on an industrial estate on the edge of the city—has been pushing warm air generated by its servers into the district heating network under Odense. That heat is then dispersed through 100,000 households hooked up to the system, with Meta providing enough heat to cover roughly 11,000.
Freiesleben, a local councilor, has a few gripes about sharing such a small city with one of the world’s biggest tech companies. Meta should pay more taxes in Denmark, he argues. Locals have also complained about the bright lights positioned around the data center’s perimeter, he says. But those concerns are trumped by the benefits of the heating system. “It’s a really good idea to use the heat that would otherwise just vanish into thin air,” Freiesleben says. Would he accept more data centers in his city if they were also hooked up to the heating system? “The simple answer,” he says, “is yes.”
Odense is the first place in the world where Meta has tried to pipe excess heat from a data center directly into people’s homes—but it’s not the only tech company doing so. In Ireland, an Amazon data center already helps heat TU Dublin, a university, while Microsoft is building what is expected to be the world’s largest data center heating system in Espoo, a city in southern Finland.
It’s a trend that’s expected to grow. The current AI boom has been accompanied by a data center construction rush. Companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon will have to invest about $1 trillion on infrastructure to handle computing demand for AI, according to research firm Dell’Oro Group.
All those data centers produce a lot of heat. If that heat is redirected to local homes, it can help Big Tech firms meet their climate pledges, and governments can say they struck a deal that made Big Tech give something back to the local community.
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