Project to Use Data Center Waste Heat to Farm Fish

An environmental attorney and geothermal expert plans to redevelop an 8-acre brownfield in Ohio into a sustainable commercial sea bass farm that uses waste heat generated by an underground data center.

The Foundry Project in will recycle waste heat generated from an underground data center and then use it to warm the Northcoast Fish Farm, reported ZDnet. The project was announced last month.

The first initiative will be to build the aquaculture facility, a for-profit $4.5 million fish farm that will produce 500,000 pounds of Mediterranean sea bass, known as Branzino, each year. Production of 10,000 pounds per week is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2016.

A 20,000- to 40,000-square-foot underground bunkered data center will also be built as part of the project. A customer has been found, but the project founders did not reveal further details. The site could be highly attractive to data center operators because it sits on three different 100 Gigabit fiber networks giving any operation easy access to redundant high-performance networks, ZDnet reported.

All fish waste will be used by Northcoast Orchards, which will use the nutrient-rich material as fertilizer either in the greenhouses or local orchards.