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Org that represents Meta, Google and Microsoft plans more heat reuse guidelines as debate over bit barn social license burns red hot
The Open Compute Project plans to deliver more guidance to local governments on how excess heat from datacenters can benefit their communities.The project develops open-source and energy-efficient hardware for datacenter operators. Meta, Microsoft, and Google are all top-tier Platinum members, and are also all building datacenters as fast as they can, to house AI infrastructure.Those builds have become controversial. Residents in communities flagged as sites for new bit barns have protested the quantity of water and energy they will consume, their potential to drive up prices for both, and the noise they emit. Some may be aware that datacenters create urban heat islands.
Protests about new datacenters have aleady turned violent. Governments have sometimes acknowledged concerns by implementing a moratorium on big builds, but on other occasions have indicated they might fast-track developments and brush aside red tape.
Into that febrile environment strode David Gardiner, Otto Van Geet, Jaime Comella, and Bharath Ramakrishnan, all of whom have participated in the OCP’s heat reuse group, with a Wednesday post extolling the virtues of datacenters when local governments are smart enough to tap excess heat that bit barns produce.
