In this day and age, data centers use over 3% of the global electricity supply and their greenhouse gas emissions are in the same carbon footprint area as the airline industry: the servers generate heat that needs to be dissipated, usually through the use of air conditioning. 
Why build a data center, then, if you can put servers in people’s homes and re-utilize the energy used for the computations to heat up their water? That’s why at Nerdalize we have built a heating device based on computer servers. One of our server-heaters can supply 80% of the needed heating for a household of four – this lets us save 2 tons of CO2 per home per year and the benefits are not just for the environment! The Dutch citizens hosting our servers in their homes save approximately €200 per year on their gas bill. The lack of need to build a physical space to contain our servers impacts our cost structure, allowing us to offer a cloud service at a price that is 40% lower than our competitors’ with no compromise on performance. Not all heroes wear capes, but they sure do all care about the planet!