AI Is Heating the Olympic Pool

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In a huge, terracotta-coloured warehouse in the northeastern outskirts of Paris, inside a labyrinth of windowless corridors, a deafening roar emanates from behind rows of nameless grey doors, beneath white strip lights where disposable earphones are provided to insulate passersby from the noise.

These are the mysterious insides of one of France’s newest data centers, completed earlier this year and now Olympic Aquatics Center— as seen from the data center’s roof. When American swimming star Katie Ledecky won her ninth Olympic gold medal last week, she did so by sprinting through water that was at least partially heated by machines in the data center.

The noisy facility, known as PA10, belongs to American data center company Equinix, and the humming is the company’s cooling systems trying to keep customers’ computer servers cool. “PA10 is specially made for high-density racks,” says Imane Elazi, a data center engineer at the facility, pointing to a tower of servers that can train AI.

For the past month, the data center has been turning hot air waste into water and sending it to a local energy system run by a French utility company. ENGIEAt full capacity, Equinix expects the building will be able to pump 6.6 megawatts of heat — enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

According to predictions, A.I. Turbocharged The amount of power data centers need (Equinix predicts power consumption per rack could increase by up to 400%) PA10 reflects a European phenomenon where authorities are trying to mitigate the environmental impact of a coming AI energy crisis and turn data centers into part of the infrastructure that keeps cities warm.

Elazi describes the project as a “win-win situation” for both Equinix and the city of Seine-Saint-Denis. Equinix can pipe heat out of the buildings, reducing the strain on cooling equipment, and the city gets a cheap, locally produced source of heat, she explains. The project will: 2 million euros In response to a $2.1 million investment from the city of Paris, Equinix has pledged to provide electricity free of charge for 15 years. It also attracted attention As an environmental benefit, it claims that using the data centre as an energy source will reduce local CO2 emissions by 1,800 tonnes.₂ Annual emissions.

However, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), France has a “very low-carbon electricity mix”. 62 percent Critics say the proliferation of heat-recycling projects is distracting from the real issue: how much land, water, and electricity data centers consume, with 20 percent of their electricity coming from nuclear power. “If you already have a data center, it’s natural that reusing heat is better than doing nothing,” says Anne-Laure Rigozat, a professor of computer science at the French National School of Industrial Management and Informatics (ENSIIE). “But the question is how many data centers there are and how much energy they consume.” Installing a basic electric heating system without a data center would have less of an environmental impact, she adds.