Using AI to Heat the Olympic Pool

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At the moment, we’re seeing the AI hype cycle play out. Standing atop the peak of inflated expectations, we are inundated with a variety of buzzwords and jargon that make it seem like AI could do anything.

While the hype around AI will eventually die off, there is a unique application around this technology that many may not have thought about – heating water.

Specifically, American data center company Equinix is using an AI-powered data center in the northeast suburbs of Paris to partially heat the Olympic Aquatics Center. This building is hosting the swimming events during the 2024 Paris Olympics, with a main swimming pool that holds nearly 2.5 million liters of water.

To Equinix, this is something of a win-win scenario. The Equinix Pa10 data center is especially made for the high-density racks needed for AI tasks such as training. These racks generate an enormous amount of heat, and need to be cooled anyway in order for them to function properly.

While the Olympic pool heating is certainly an attention grabber, it’s not the only plan Equinix has for its excess heat. In fact, Equinix received a €2 million investment from the city of Paris to provide energy to the suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis free-of-charge for 15 years.

In fact, it would seem the local government is pleased with this recent action from Equinix. Mathieu Hanotin, the mayor of Sein-Saint-Denis, claimed that using the data center as an energy source will spare the region 1,800 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year.

Using excess heat from an already-running data center is a brilliant idea that is an example of a circular economy model. Purchasing energy from outside sources – such as with fossil fuels – creates an economic model that is desperately centered around the whims of the suppliers. That said, it’s important to note that the solution to the world’s energy crisis isn’t to simply build more data centers.

An article from Wired on the topic quoted computer science professor Anne-Laure Ligozat’s realistic criticism of this work. She states that it obviously makes sense to use waste heat from data centers that already exist. However, data centers consume so much land, water, and electricity that solely relying on them for energy generation makes no sense. In fact, she states that there would be less of an environmental impact to have a basic electricity heating system without the data center at all.

Of course, data centers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon – and as such, Equinix’s decision to use its waste heat sustainably is a valuable use of an otherwise unwanted resource.