'I heat my Essex home with a data centre in the shed'

Data centers use a tremendous amount of power and create a lot of heat. The two are connected -- the more power the more heat. Both of those things are hard to deal with when they are very densely packed. The enabling capability is network bandwidth. The more network bandwidth we can create the more distributed we can physically place all that electricity and heat, which can make it easier to generate and use both of them. This article reminded me of the hot tub heated by a Bitcoin miner that I saw at Bitcoin Miami. Heat has uses, and if we can put the heat generation where it is needed you get a better solution for everyone. But the network bandwidth is needed to make that compute useful.