Equinix turns Milan heat into supply

Equinix and A2A have signed terms for a data centre heat recovery project that will feed thermal energy from Equinix’s Settimo Milanese campus into Milan’s district heating network.

The partners say the scheme could recover up to 225GWh of thermal energy a year once fully operational. That would increase the heat distributed through A2A’s Milan district heating network by around 20%, with enough recovered energy to meet the heating needs of more than 21,000 homes.

The official Equinix newsroom update says A2A will build a new energy centre near the data centre campus, using four large-scale heat pumps with 72MW of total capacity, two thermal storage systems with 6,000 cubic metres of capacity, and dedicated infrastructure to move heat into the urban network.

Heat reuse moves beyond the brochure

Data centre heat reuse is often discussed as a planning benefit, but the hard part is not the principle. It is the thermal grade, customer demand, district network proximity, commercial model, and engineering interface between a mission-critical facility and a public heat system. The Milan project is important because it puts numbers around those questions.

Equinix will design and manage the heat export system from its campus, while A2A will handle the conversion and distribution infrastructure. The recovered heat will support a network that already supplies major parts of Milan, including central areas around the Duomo and Palazzo Reale. That gives the scheme an urban energy role, not just a local offset claim.

The scale also matters. Outside the Nordics, where district heating is more common and heat reuse has stronger structural support, large data centre heat export projects have been harder to deliver. Milan is a warmer and more complex urban environment, so a 225GWh annual figure, if achieved, would give other European cities a more substantial reference point.

AI loads sharpen the thermal question

The project comes as high-density AI infrastructure raises the amount of heat that must be removed from data halls. Higher rack densities can improve the economics of heat capture if the thermal system is designed for it, but they can also make cooling plant more complex and capital intensive. Waste heat is only useful if it can be captured at a usable temperature, moved efficiently, and consumed when needed.

That creates a closer relationship between data centre design and municipal energy planning. A campus built without regard for nearby heat demand may reject large amounts of low-grade heat into the atmosphere. A campus planned around a district network can become part of a city’s heating system, but it also introduces new operational interfaces and responsibilities.

The partnership gives Equinix a sustainability and community-integration story in a market where data centre development is drawing more scrutiny. For A2A, it adds a new source of decarbonised heat to a network that can absorb it. The practical test will be reliability, seasonal utilisation, and whether the economics work when electricity prices, heat-pump operation, network investment, and data centre uptime requirements are all included.

Heat reuse will not solve the data centre sector’s power problem. It does, however, change the local energy balance. In dense urban markets, that can be the difference between a vague environmental claim and an infrastructure benefit that planners can measure.