A thing that started with a question I couldn’t find the answer to: where does all the waste heat from European data centres go? Turns out, mostly nowhere. Not because the technology doesn’t work — heat pumps are fine, pipes are fine — but because nobody had mapped the supply.
There are datasets that tell you where data centres are. Cloudscene, Data Center Map, EUDCA. None of them include thermal profiles. None tell you what temperature the heat exits at, how much there is, or whether the operator would connect to a district heating network. The information infrastructure for a waste heat market simply didn’t exist.
The regulation thing
Germany’s EnEfG changed the calculus. Every data centre operator above a certain threshold now files annual waste heat reports with BAFA — verified thermal profiles including output volume, temperature grade, and availability. France has Décret 2025-1382. The Netherlands has RVO/EED. Ireland has CRU rules. Each country independently creating the raw material for a European waste heat market, but filing into separate national archives in different formats and languages.
I started wondering: what if the compliance document that operators have to file is also the product listing that buyers want to search? The same data serves both purposes. A verified thermal profile is a compliance filing and a marketplace entry.
What Ardor does
A searchable map of European data centre waste heat. 111 facilities across 10 countries. Operators verify their listings through compliance filings or direct engagement. Buyers — district heating operators, industrial facilities, municipal planners — search by location, temperature, capacity, and segment.
The compliance business (EnEfG reports for German operators) is the customer acquisition funnel. Every filing adds a verified profile to the marketplace. The marketplace is the product.
What I keep thinking about
The interesting structural thing: the EU is accidentally building a waste heat market. Country by country, regulation by regulation, they’re creating a continent-wide dataset of verified thermal supply. But nobody is aggregating it into a searchable layer. The data exists in national archives. It’s just not useful yet.
That’s the gap. Not technology, not willingness — information infrastructure.
Stack: Next.js 16 (Turbopack) · Supabase · Stripe · Mapbox GL · Resend · Vercel 111 facilities · 10 countries · DE/FR/NL/IE/Nordics ardor.institute