atNorth plans mega datacenter that will help grow veggies and heat homes

Nordic datacenter operator atNorth says its next facility - the biggest to date - is to feature a heat reuse scheme for large-scale greenhouses and local housing.

The new campus near Billund Airport in Denmark, branded DEN02, is being designed to cater for data-intensive businesses such as hyperscalers and companies looking to run AI and high-performance compute (HPC) workloads.

Set to expand to several hundred megawatts of capacity, the bit barn campus will have an initial capacity of 250 MW when it opens, which isn't expected before the end of 2026, atNorth told us. Denmark has an average mean temperature of 7.7˚C (46˚F).

In line with many other contemporary datacenter projects, this one is being constructed with an eye to greater sustainability and the environment, so will implement a heat reuse scheme.

This side of things will be handled via an agreement signed with Wa3rm, a company that gets involved with the development of "circular industrial projects," and will oversee the recycling of excess heat from the DEN02 site for use in greenhouses for vegetable production.

There are also plans to provide heating and hot water for local communities via the district heating supplier, but atNorth told The Register that while it is in discussions with potential clients, there is nothing to announce at this time.

Eyjólfur Magnús Kristinsson, CEO of Iceland-based atNorth, claimed the DEN02 site is being designed to serve as a blueprint for future datacenters.

"The highly energy efficient design, including its state-of-the-art heat reuse technologies, coupled with the advantageous location in Denmark and our dedication to sustainability, exemplifies innovation in our industry. It will be an ideal location for hyperscalers and AI businesses looking to decarbonize their high-performance workloads," he claimed.

Along with other datacenter operators, atNorth is looking to source renewable energy to provide power for the infrastructure in its facilities, and this will likely take the form of wind and solar energy farms around the DEN02 site.

Schemes to reuse waste heat from datacenters have become more common over the past few years, especially in Europe where the EU's Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) requires operators to take into account best practice on energy efficiency.

• Google's €1B Finnish datacenter expansion to heat the local community
• Plans to heat districts with datacenters may prove too hot to handle
• Deep Green gets £200M from power supplier to scale waste heat reuse
• Datacenters feeling the heat to turn hot air into cool solutions

However a report from digital trade association TechUK earlier this year warned of the potential pitfalls in using datacenter waste heat for district heating purposes, such as the relatively low temperatures involved and uncertainty in how much heat a site may produce over time.

This hasn't stopped schemes including those in Groningen, the Netherlands, and separate projects planned by Google and Microsoft in Finland.

Yet as The Register has noted before, the most unusual heat reuse scheme we are aware of is a datacenter in Hokkaido, Japan, which uses snow to cool its IT infrastructure then makes use of the resulting warm meltwater to cultivate eels for sale at market.

Please let us know if you encounter any other unusual use cases. ®