[gruez]

Surely it's just cheaper to build further away from residential areas? For this to work you'd need to be close to residential areas, but that's where you get the most NIMBY opposition. And if the datacenter is in the middle of some industrial park, who would want to drive 30 minutes to an industrial park to have a swim?

[macNchz]

An outdoor heated pool that’s open all winter in a cold climate would be a destination worth a drive. A rather decadent use of energy otherwise, it’d be a good use for waste heat. There’s prior art in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland, a destination spa that uses water from a geothermal power plant.

[fmbb]

The Blue Lagoon is more like using waste cold than waste heat.

[lvspiff]

The best waterparks in Tucson, AZ were on the outskirts of the city and worked great as a place to "travel" to for the parents as the kids would be wiped out on the way back. Breakers....Justins....how i miss those days of running around on hot pavement or gravel in bare feat only to also step on some cactus...

[chasd00]

Hah yeah if you, as a parent, can survive a day at the water park in the sun then you’re all set for some quiet time when you get home. Waterparks zap kids and they pass out cold in the car as soon as the doors close. Same goes for the beach.

[vidarh]

The last place I lived, the nearest data centre was a few hundred meters from the local swimming pool, in a business park. Most people would never have known the data centre was there.

Elsewhere, e.g. in London, Docklands is both full of high density data centres and high-end residential buildings and offices that could certain use the waste heat in winter at least.

Most of the data centres there just looks like office buildings on the outside, and most residents won't know they are there.

[nucleardog]

As a kid I have memories of driving a bit out the edge of town to a big steel plant for almost exactly this reason, it's not totally insane.

There's plenty of free parking, free admission, giant pool with some small waterslides and stuff, a bunch of picnic tables and public barbecues, generally some nice greenery and trees for shade, ponds and fountains and stuff, a bandstand, etc.

It's not somewhere you'd pop over to for a "quick swim", but especially for lower income people it's a great place to have around as a "grab a pack of hotdogs and your swim trunks and make a day of it" sort of thing. As a kid we couldn't afford to, say, go to the actual waterslide park or anything so I have a lot of fond memories of visiting the steel plant.

I'm sure the construction and upkeep was less than a rounding error in terms of construction and upkeep costs for the plant itself.