Helsinki will heat homes with waste heat from AI data centres
A partnership between a Finnish data centre operator and Helsinki's district energy provider will route waste heat from AI computing into the city's heating network, warming the equivalent of roughly 70,000 apartments a year.
A Finnish data centre operator and Helsinki’s district heating utility have struck a deal to capture waste heat generated by AI computing hardware and feed it directly into the city’s heating network, turning what is normally an expensive cooling problem into a usable energy resource.
The companies estimate the recovered heat will exceed 500,000 megawatt-hours a year once fully operational — enough, they say, to warm roughly 70,000 apartments — with the system expected to come fully online in 2027. Helsinki’s cold climate and existing district heating infrastructure make it an unusually good fit for this kind of heat-reuse project, which is harder to pull off in cities without centralised heating networks already in place.
As AI data centres multiply and draw growing scrutiny over their electricity and water use, waste-heat recovery is emerging as one of the more concrete ways operators can offset their footprint rather than simply building more renewable generation capacity to match rising demand.