Apple to expand its Viborg, Denmark data center and capture heat energy for the city

Apple Viborg Data Center
Apple Viborg Data Center (Image credit: Apple)

What you need to know

  • Apple has announced that it is expanding its Viborg data center.
  • The Danish data center will also begin collecting excess heat energy.
  • The Viborg data center already provides power for the Danish power grid.

Apple has announced that it plans to expand operations at its Viborg, Denmark data center while also installing infrastructure that will allow it to capture excess heat energy for the benefit of the city.

As part of a wider announcement relating to the company's environmental initiatives, Apple confirmed that it will grow operations at its existing Viborg data center, although it didn't go into detail as to what that will look like. The Viborg data center will also collect excess heat energy for use in the surrounding city.

Over the next year, Apple will expand the Viborg data center's operations and build new infrastructure to capture excess heat energy for the city's long-term benefit. As with its data centers, all Apple offices and retail stores across 44 countries have sourced 100 percent clean energy since 2018, including through Green Bond proceeds.

The same data center already uses the world's largest onshore wind turbines as its power source with all surplus energy being fuelled back into the Danish power grid.

"Apple is committed to leaving the planet better than we found it, and our Green Bonds are a key tool to drive our environmental efforts forward," said Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives. "Our investments are advancing the breakthrough technologies needed to reduce the carbon footprint of the materials we use, even as we move to using only recyclable and renewable materials across our products to conserve the earth's finite resources."

Apple has made Green Bond investments totaling $4.7 billion with more details about what the company is doing with them available in a longer Newsroom post now available.

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.