A German company called AoTerra has developed a method of reusing waste heat from servers by embedding them into households. So basically their customers will be able to heat their homes using a cloud server.
The servers are encased in a special fireproof box that the owner can’t open and the box is linked to the home’s heating system either through a heat exchanger or directly to the water boiler.
AoTerra’s idea has been funded through Seedmatch, and so far got 756,000 euros ($975,000).
Companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and others have been competing for years to get the best out of the heat their servers produce, instead of just dumping the water into some river, which is damaging to the fish population. AoTerra is the first to have come up with this idea and since the internet is nowadays cloud-based and distributed, so are its servers.
5 stars from us, and let’s hope they reach their 10 million euro target by 2014.
