The heatMicroLink Data Centers

A data centre is a machine for turning electricity into heat.

An incandescent bulb spends nine tenths of its power making heat and calls the light the product. A data centre does the same thing at twenty megawatts, and calls the computing the product.

Cooling and facility overhead on a 20 MW site, at US industrial power of about 8 cents a kilowatt hour, before a single server is bought.

$7.0M a yearspent removing the heat, on a site that has not yet computed anything with it.

The problemOne idea, one image, one number

The answerMicroLink Data Centers

The same heat, put to work four times.

We do not remove the heat and hope somebody wants it. The whole design is arranged around it, so one stream of warm water does four separate jobs before it ever reaches the sky.

$2.2M

Heat the host buys, every year

Displacing the gas their boiler burns now

$5.3M

Cooling we never have to buy

7.6 MW less overhead than a conventional hall

2 100+

US sites nobody else counts as sites

District energy, wastewater, breweries

6 months

From signature to first load

Against 2028 for colocation signed today

One electron, two jobs. The compute is paid for once, and the heat is sold again on the way out.

Dollar figures per year on a 20 MW siteNext: the pod that does it

The receiving end · heat leaving across one crossing

What MicroLink does

We put the compute where the heat is worth something

MicroLink is the designer, builder, owner and operator of high density compute placed inside existing industrial facilities. We are designers first. We add value to generation instead of competing with it, we upgrade the infrastructure of the places we sit in, and we hand the heat back to the facility around us rather than throwing it away. The tenant gets the capacity. The host gets the heat. The community gets a partner.

Heat recovered:85%Heat is reused rather than cooled

Water use:ClosedClosed loop with a dry cooler path, no evaporation

Communities:EngagedConsultation before design, not after permitting

Energy

We add value to generation rather than competing for it, taking power that is curtailed, stranded or behind the meter and turning it into revenue for the generator
We do not raise energy costs for anyone else, because power passes through to the tenant at cost and our load sits inside a facility that is already connected
We accelerate the transition to renewables by giving new solar, wind and storage a firm, flexible offtaker from day one
We can be interrupted, which makes the load an asset to the grid instead of a burden on it

Compute

We increase rack density, putting far more compute into the same footprint through direct to chip liquid cooling
We are moving to 800 V DC distribution, cutting conversion stages and copper between the point of connection and the rack
We build modular, so the module is manufactured in a factory and the work on site is connection rather than construction
We deploy in blocks, so capacity tracks demand instead of being built years ahead of it
We build to the tenant's redundancy requirement, N, N+1 or 2N on the electrical and cooling plant, set in the contract rather than assumed

Heat

We hand the heat back through a single exchanger that gives the host partner a clean, defined connection
A wastewater treatment plant uses it to hold digester temperature through winter, which is the load it burns the most gas to carry
A greenhouse or vertical farm uses it to grow through a cold season that would otherwise stop production
A district heating network takes it straight into the return leg and stops firing a boiler to make the same water
We keep the dry cooler path in the architecture, so the module runs at full load whether or not the sink is taking heat
We report Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE) alongside PUE, because recovered energy is the number that actually matters

Data centres designed to improve the place they sit in, not just occupy it.

The case

Five points that make the difference

Heat is a second revenue line

A conventional data centre throws its heat away. Next to a district heating network, that same heat has a buyer who is already paying for it in gas. On 20 MW of IT load, roughly $14M a year against the same capital.

It need not be taken as cash. The value can go back to the host as discounted heat, or be traded for a lower power price, or for grid capacity at a site otherwise years down an interconnection queue.

Cumulative heat revenue from 20 MW of IT load at PUE 1.12 and ERE 0.48, held flat with no escalator applied.

Cumulative heat revenue over a 15 year lease

Water use, closed loop against evaporative cooling

The water stays in the loop

Evaporative cooling is what makes a campus a water story in the local press. A closed loop with a dry cooler path removes the argument before it starts, which is the difference between a permit granted and a permit fought.

Measured peak daily water use, Vantage Data Centers Port Washington Wisconsin, closed loop against a comparable evaporative campus.

The workload is coming back off cloud

Enterprises are moving AI workloads out of public cloud and into infrastructure they own or co-locate, driven by cost at scale, data sovereignty rules and disaster recovery that cannot sit in one provider.

Illustrative. Share of enterprise AI workloads moving off public cloud into owned and co-located infrastructure over a ten year window.

Full stack architecture

One module, one heat exchanger, one control system, assembled at whatever scale the host facility and the sink can carry. A cabinet in a plant room and a 750 MW campus are the same product counted differently.

Sites in development

Twelve sites in the portfolio, each an existing industrial facility with a heat sink already attached. We are working toward breaking ground on all of them.

Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaDistrict energy20 MW
Bethlehem, PennsylvaniaUniversity and utility15 MW
Massena, New YorkHydro and industrial60 MW
Brooklyn, New YorkWastewater15 MW
Princeton, New JerseyUniversity10 MW
New York StatePublic programme5 MW
Mansfield, OhioCampus development750 MW
San Jose, CaliforniaIndustrial host10 MW

Eight of twelve shown. Frankfurt, Tokyo and two further US sites are at an earlier stage. Alongside these, we have continuing discussions on a public programme placing units in K to 12 schools, a global pod rollout across the bottling plants of a beverage manufacturer, and a number of university collaborations.

BuildingBetterDataCenters