I’d prefer we don’t datacenter to the gills, but if we’re destined to do it anyway, they should offer free Heat/data services to the communities they’re thrust upon, and the agreement should be on the datacenter licensing so they can’t reorg out of it.
Anecdotal, but I researched something similar for a job I had almost 10 years ago. Next to the office we had a pretty big datacenter, which I know had ”district cooling”, so I wondered if this was fed back into the district heating network somehow?
Turn out no, mainly because the local thermal power plant is already fed into the district heating network, and that already produces was more east heat than nessecary to provide heating in the city.
Eventually they did an expansion and I was told the district cooling was scrapped in favor of local ”free cooling” units. Basically just dumping the waste heat directly to the air (This works in the right climate, so like not in Arizona or Texas)