Due to paywall unfortunately not able to read the article. As someone who works with energy production, having “waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day” is incredible stupid and practically misinformation way of describing the energy amount.

I assume that they used that 9GW as heat energy output, which would be 24h x 9GWh in a day. That is in a day same amount of 23 x 1 kiloton nuke. But even these are same units, they really aren’t comparable. Another is milliseconds, another is full day.

Yes, venting that amount of energy to waste is insanely stupid, because it should be used to something useful. That amount of heat could be used to heat cities in colder climates (northern US states/Canada/northern Europe etc).

Unfortunately US/Canada doesn’t do district heating networks like we do here in Nordics. You distribute gas to homes, we distribute hot water. That hot water can be directly taken from any waste heat source.

Microsoft’s new Espoo data center is going to heat up 60% of one of the largest cities in Finland. This is the only way these data centers make any sense to build. Other ways to do it is just financially and ecologically stupid.