Equinix has signed an agreement with energy operator A2A to recover heat produced by its data centers and integrate it into the district heating network of Milan, in northern Italy.

The project will recover thermal energy generated by servers hosted on the Equinix campus in Settimo Milanese.

Under the agreement, Equinix will design and operate the heat export system for its campus and collaborate with its customers to make the thermal energy generated by its data centers available.

The recovered heat will be transferred to the new energy center built by A2A near the site. It will then be used through four large-scale heat pumps with a total capacity of 72MW, two thermal storage systems with a capacity of 6,000 cubic meters (211,890 cubic feet) and infrastructure for transporting thermal energy to the urban grid.

Once fully operational, A2A said the project will recover approximately 225GWh per year of thermal energy, contributing to an approximately 20 percent increase in heat distributed through the A2A Group’s Milan district heating network.

A2A said the recovered energy will be able to heat more than 21,000 homes and save more than 345,000 tons of CO2 emissions.

Emanuela Grandi, managing director of Equinix Italy, said that the initiative is expected to become one of the largest data center heat export projects in Europe outside of the Nordic countries.

Grandi said: “Excess heat is a byproduct of the computing power required for digital transformation and artificial intelligence, but when we redistribute it to the areas around our data centers, we can create tremendous value for communities by reducing the overall energy needed to heat the area.

Renato Mazzoncini, CEO of A2A, said: “The collaboration with Equinix fits perfectly into our strategy of developing an integrated ecosystem in which energy, infrastructure, and innovation operate synergistically.”

The global annual waste heat generated by data centers can reach approximately 70-170TWh, depending on their scale and efficiency, according to a paper published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

The study said that data centers’ recoverable waste heat is about 35–85TWh globally, which is almost equivalent to Singapore’s annual electricity consumption.

Multiple European data centers are implementing district heating schemes to capture and reuse waste heat.

In Stockholm, Sweden, each facility in the urban data center campus Stockholm Data Parks is connected to the city’s district heating network. Near Helsinki, in Finland, Microsoft is building a data center region which it says will be “the world’s largest scheme to recycle waste heat from data centers.”

Germany has implemented a new law requiring data centers to make their waste heat available to local heating networks.

Learn more about the data center market in Italy and Southern Europe, and meet with other executives and experts from the region at the DCN Milan event next year