Saunas to use data centres excess heat

Everyone knows excess heat is one of the key challenges for data centres. So an IT services firm from Finland (where else?) have found a creative use for it, launching the first data-driven sauna.

“Sauna goers can muster up a good sweat when people all around the world are surfing the web, searching databases and using cloud services,” the Finnish-Swedish company Tieto said in a statement.

This Saturday, on April 1, the company will inaugurate the world´s first data-driven saunas at their Nordic data centres in Stockholm, Helsinki and Stavanger. The sauna named AiSauna is launched in connection with Finland´s 100-year anniversary which is celebrated throughout the year 2017.

Finland is known around the world for saunas — the country of 5 million people has around 3 million saunas. The challenge Tieto is still facing is taking the data-heat into use at wood stove saunas — the most common type of sauna outside of the city areas. In cities the electric sauna is more common.

“The amount of data stored and processed in our data centres increases rapidly. We now want to combine Finnish tradition, data from our Nordic customers and the latest technology to create something unique that contributes to a warmer society and a completely new level of digital customer experience,” Alicia Turing, data scientist and sauna architect at Tieto, said in a statement.

Tieto stores and processes data from hundreds of customers in the public and private sector. Its servers would be able to heat up to 2510 data-driven saunas for 2 hours every day (approx. 18 kWh required per sauna) around the Nordics.

“A sauna is more than a place to sweat in. Numerous problems and decisions have also been resolved there. By integrating artificial intelligence into the experience, taking notes and analyzing the conversation, we enable sauna enthusiasts to combine business with pleasure. The aim is to pave the way for truly data-driven decision making in the future worklife,” said Turing.