The significant challenges of waste heat

While modern data center are becoming more and more efficient, as seen with the constantly decreasing Power Usage Effectiveness indicator (PUE), reusing waste heat produced by hardware remains a significant challenge today and for the years to come. Because of its low temperature (30°C-60°C), the aforementioned waste heat is often defined as low-grade. As a result, it is not suitable for many applications like electricity generation and is hard to transport across long distances. It can however be used for many heating applications. Adding waste heat reuse solutions to current data center architectures is also highly complex and comes at a significant cost. One alternative is to distribute the heat source directly where it is needed by tightly integrating computing hardware with the water delivery systems in buildings, like Qarnot does. In addition, the Carbon Facts addon let’s the system precisely determine the carbon footprint of each calculation made on the infrastructure.