1 June 2026, DCpedia, Marco Verzijl

Article: From power to heat: why the data center is the new light bulb  (machine translated from Dutch)

A data center does not convert electricity into "power". It converts
electricity into digital services: storage, computing power, transactions,
AI models, video, cloud software and communication. But physically,
almost all the electricity that a data center uses eventually ends up as
heat. This applies to servers, network equipment, storage, power
supplies, UPS systems, fans, pumps and cooling. A small part leaves the
building temporarily as an electromagnetic signal, light or sound, but that
too eventually ends up almost entirely as heat in the environment.