Green IT: Heating with Server Waste Heat

An in-house data center – this brings us many advantages in our internal processes and significantly expands the range of our services.

But a data center also produces: waste heat. While in recent years many large data centers have been built on the ocean floor or in cold regions, we decided more than 15 years ago to use the resulting waste heat differently.

We heat our company building using waste heat from our data center. This is possible because our building already had excellent energy efficiency ratings – one of the prerequisites for using server heat for heating purposes at all.

Initially, heating with server waste heat requires an investment in specially adapted server systems and heat exchangers. We consciously made this entrepreneurial decision despite the long payback period – for climate protection and therefore for the environment. This system significantly reduces CO₂ emissions – by up to 50 percent!

In parallel, we have also continuously reduced our annual electricity consumption by over 20 percent in recent years, even though the number of employees has increased significantly.

[Photography by Max Conrad]