French data center firm Qarnot has launched a new data center deployment in Italy and connected it to the city’s local district heating network.

The company this week launched a data center at the Lamarmora power plant in Brescia in Lombardy, in partnership with local energy firm A2A.

Qarnot’s first deployment in Italy, the waste heat from the liquid-cooled data center pods will be used in A2A’s district heating network in the city.

Paul Benoit, Qarnot’s CEO, said: “Partnering with A2A represents a pivotal moment for Qarnot as we enter the Italian market. We are fully committed to leveraging our cutting-edge data center technology to actively contribute to A2A’s decarbonization strategy and to support the broader transition towards a more sustainable energy landscape.”

Brescia’s district heating network totals more than 684 kilometers of pipelines and 22,000 connected customers.

The Qarnot project is structured in two phases. The first phase, now-operational, involves 30 QBx computing units capable of generating about 800MWh of thermal energy annually. Images shared by the companies suggest the 30 computing units are housed in two pods.

“The rapid expansion of data centers and the growing electrification of consumption call for major investments in power grids to support the increasing demand for energy. At the same time, they also offer an extraordinary opportunity for cities equipped with district heating networks: to recover waste heat from servers and convert it into usable thermal energy,” added Renato Mazzoncini, CEO of A2A Group. “The pilot project with Qarnot, officially inaugurated today, is further proof that integrating energy recovery from the earliest design stages of data centers means creating strategic infrastructure for the future: more competitive cities, more sustainable communities, and heat available where it is needed, without relying on fossil fuels.”

Heat from the Qarnot pods can be recovered at 65°C, suitable for direct use in the district heating network via heat exchangers. Air cooling generally recovers heat at around 30°C, requiring supplemental heating through heat pumps to step the water up to the required temperature.

The next phase, “Qarnot 2,” is already in design and involves installing servers in the former coal storage area at the Lamarmora plant. Supported by European funding, the deployment will generate 16GWh of thermal energy annually, enough to provide heat and hot water to approximately 1,350 apartments. The companies aim to bring this phase online within the next two years.

“Once again, Brescia confirms its role as a city-laboratory, testing increasingly advanced technologies to improve CO2 emission levels in the atmosphere,” said Laura Castelletti, Mayor of Brescia. “We are proud that this laboratory begins in Brescia and are confident it can become a model for Italy and Europe. A2A is our partner on this path toward increasingly sustainable prospects.”

Founded around 2010, Qarnot was previously known as a “digital boiler” startup, placing its compute hardware in locations where it could heat water in office or residential developments. Qarnot typically uses a model where servers are “distributed throughout the city” and “directly installed in buildings where waste heat is recovered (housing, offices, schools, logistics warehouses, etc.).”

In 2020, the company raised around $6.5 million, adding to the $2.5m it had received from Data4 Group a few years earlier. It raised another €35 million ($37.5m) in early 2023 to expand its operations. This year, it raised more funding via the European Innovation Council.

The company says that it currently has more than 50,000 computing cores spread over many sites in France and Europe, particularly in Finland. TechCrunch has previously reported that the company rolled out a pilot data center in Finland with 100kW of compute. It has also said it would be installing its QBx computing unit in data centers in France and Europe with power ranging from ‘hundreds of kW to a few MW.’

Companies including MaiaSpace, an ArianeGroup subsidiary, and Dark reportedly use Qarnot’s infrastructure for complex aerodynamics, propulsion, and thermal modeling simulations.