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Ambient cooling can only go so far. At the end of the day if you have a rack of GPU’s using 6000 watts per node, you’re going to need some very serious active cooling regardless of your location. You’ll save a little but it’s a small percentage of your overall costs.

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in industrial manufacturing, recovering waste heat is a very common junior engineer task, usually a great first year project from recent grads to do a simple, $50-100k project that has a 1-2 year payback period.

Surely someone in the trillion dollar datacenter industry can figure out a way to take waste heat and use it in a profitable way, right?

I’d guess that there’s not enough energy density in the waste heat to do anything useful, especially once you bring it away from the clean areas of the facility where it’s produced to someplace you could actually use it at scale.

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