The Science of GPU Heat Recovery: Turning FLOPS into Warmth
Every floating-point operation generates heat. Every matrix multiplication warms a tensor—and at IWS, every warm tensor warms a family. Today, we're diving deep into the thermodynamics behind our eco-friendly (allegedly) infrastructure.
The Physics of GPU Heating
An NVIDIA H100 GPU consumes approximately 700 watts under full load. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics (specifically the first one), nearly 100% of that electrical energy is converted to heat. This isn't a bug—it's our entire business model.
At IWS scale, our GPU fleet generates:
- 99.6 megawatts of continuous thermal output
- 85.4 million BTU/hour (for our American friends)
- Enough heat to warm 12,847 European apartments to a cozy 21°C
- Enough heat to make a small volcano jealous
Our Heat Recovery Architecture
Traditional data centers pump their heat into the atmosphere and call it a day. We call that "thermal waste" and also "a missed revenue opportunity."
The IWS Thermal Recovery System (TRS™) works as follows:
Stage 1 - GPU-Level Extraction: Custom liquid cooling blocks capture heat directly from GPU dies at temperatures up to 85°C. This is hot enough to make tea, though we don't recommend it.
Stage 2 - Pod Aggregation: Heat from 8-GPU pods is aggregated into a primary loop running at 65°C—optimal for residential heating applications.
Stage 3 - District Distribution: Heated water is pumped through insulated pipes to connected apartment buildings, typically within a 2km radius. Beyond 2km, we just build another data center.
Stage 4 - Apartment Delivery: Standard hydronic radiators in apartments receive the GPU-warmed water. Residents often report their apartments smell faintly of gradient descent.
Thermal SLAs
Unlike traditional cloud providers, IWS offers Thermal Service Level Agreements:
- Minimum Heat Guarantee: Connected apartments receive minimum 18°C ambient temperature year-round
- Thermal Uptime: 99.9% heating availability (GPU failures count as heating downtime)
- Response Time: If an apartment drops below 16°C, we spin up emergency inference workloads within 15 minutes
Yes, we have literally created a system where AI inference is used for emergency heating. The future is now.
The Economics of Warmth
Our heat recovery system creates a virtuous economic cycle:
- Customers pay premium prices for GPU compute
- GPUs generate heat as a byproduct of expensive calculations
- Heat is sold to property developers at below-market rates
- Property developers offer "tech-heated" apartments at premium rents
- Everyone makes money except the GPU customers, who were already prepared to lose it
Environmental Impact*
By replacing traditional gas and electric heating, IWS heat recovery prevents an estimated:
- 34,000 tons of CO₂ emissions annually
- 12 million m³ of natural gas consumption
- 89 GWh of electric heating demand
*These figures were calculated by our marketing team using a methodology we describe as "optimistic." Independent verification is pending and will remain pending indefinitely.
What Happens When Demand Drops?
A common question: what happens to apartment heating when GPU demand is low?
Answer: GPU demand is never low. We're IWS. But hypothetically:
- We run "thermal maintenance" workloads (cryptocurrency mining, but we don't talk about it)
- We offer emergency spot pricing to attract workloads
- We have backup gas boilers (the irony is not lost on us)