Brescia A2A Inaugurates First Data Center Heating the City by Recovering Heat

Brescia. An innovative “green” data center has been activated in the city, housed in the Lamarmora plant and built by A2A in collaboration with Qarnot. The special feature? A liquid cooling system that recovers waste heat up to 65 °C, reinserting it directly into the city’s district heating network.

An advanced solution that recovers excess digital heat and transforms it into useful thermal energy, useful to provide approximately 16 GWh per year, or the thermal needs of approximately 1,350 apartments. The initiative will avoid the emission of 3,500 tons of CO₂ per year, the equivalent of the absorption of a forest of 22,000 trees.

The inauguration was attended by Mayor Laura Castelletti, A2A CEO Renato Mazzoncini, and Qarnot CEO Paul Benoit. “The heat produced by servers can become an urban energy resource,” explained Mazzoncini, while the mayor defined Brescia as a “laboratory of sustainability and innovation.”

The project is the first in Italy to combine high-performance data centers and urban district heating, with the aim of increasingly decarbonizing the city. The city network, extended over 684 km, already supplies 83% of the heat from non-fossil sources. The future includes a second phase (called “Qarnot 2”) which will bring thermal production to 16 GWh per year, thanks to European funding.

With this initiative, Brescia strengthens its pioneering model in Europe, demonstrating that the recovery of digital heat is a strategic lever for greener and more competitive cities.