About ten years ago, before working at Amazon, my last job involved building a datacenter in Leiden, the Netherlands. There the city has a municipal heat exchange program and we could also vent the excess heat to be used for heating water.
Modern data centers, especially for Cloud services, are really really really big though ... so big that they have specialized real estate and power requirements. The locations where you can get that much power, and that much space, tend to be outer sub-urban or quite remote. In those locations, there are few consumers for excess heat so more effort goes into reclaiming the energy loss through other means.
About ten years ago, before working at Amazon, my last job involved building a datacenter in Leiden, the Netherlands. There the city has a municipal heat exchange program and we could also vent the excess heat to be used for heating water.
Modern data centers, especially for Cloud services, are really really really big though ... so big that they have specialized real estate and power requirements. The locations where you can get that much power, and that much space, tend to be outer sub-urban or quite remote. In those locations, there are few consumers for excess heat so more effort goes into reclaiming the energy loss through other means.