Infomaniak, the Geneva company specializing in website hosting, will inaugurate a data center in Geneva, using 100% of its electricity consumption to heat up to 6,000 households.
In Switzerland, there are around fifty data centers, places dedicated to the storage of digital data. The major drawback of these buildings is that they consume and waste a lot of energy.
“There are tens of thousands of servers that operate day and night, summer and winter. These servers consume a lot of electricity. By 2026, this would represent the equivalent of the consumption of Japan”, explains in Forum, Thomas Jacobsen , spokesperson for Infomaniak. “All this electricity is wasted in the atmosphere.”
To partly avoid this waste, the Geneva company had already removed in 2013 “all air conditioning because this is what consumes a lot of energy and reduces the energy efficiency of the centers”.
A unique project
But Infomaniak wanted to “go further” and developed a unique project which allows the energy consumed for its activities to be fully recovered and thus to stop waste. This data center uses 100% of its electricity consumption “by using the energy once for storage and AI calculation, and a second time to heat 6,000 households”, notes Thomas Jacobsen.
-The data center is installed in the basement of the La Bistoquette housing cooperative district, in Geneva. The heat produced by the servers should be used for the inhabitants of the cooperative from summer 2025.
Comments collected by Renaud Malik/lan
Swiss
