The world’s largest particle accelerator now has an important new mission: heating thousands of homes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has begun to funnel the waste heat from its cooling system to a new residential and commercial area in the nearby French town of Ferney-Voltaire, with the new linkup expected to be able to heat several thousand homes at once.
I’d say the govts should make it mandatory for anyone making a large enough data centre, to create a heat transfer infrastructure to nearby localities. The locals can then buy hot water (metered) via pipelines from the local govt and that can go towards paying for the power extension tax that the data centre has to pay.
Oh yes, there needs to be a power extension tax first, which is levied on anyone setting up data centres to use for wasteful stuff like AI, Crypto-mining etc. Of course, that only matters if they are taking power from the grid and/or building near populated areas (any amount of population).