One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.
These are future plans and they lack specificity. I don't think they will come to fruition. The problem is that waste water from data centers isn't hot enough.
First link: "With the ambition to phase out its coal-fired plant by 2025, Denmark’s third largest district heating company, Fjernvarme Fyn, has established Denmark’s biggest heat pump plant. The plant will recover 215,000 MWh of energy from Meta’s hyperscale Tietgenbyen data centre and redistribute the surplus heat to the district heating network of the city of Odense."
As it clearly says on the page, this project was completed in 2019. The commercial use began in early 2020.
Even in the very sentence you quoted they are writing about plans to retire a coal plant by 2025 in future tense. This should be a very obvious hint that the text was written some time ago - unless, of course, the reader is not aware of what year we currently are living in.
In 2024, Fjernvarme Fyn reported ([1], page 19) they were recovering enough heat from that very site to heat almost 7000 homes in Odense and that the number can still rise significantly as the data center expands.
I got very annoyed by the pending update pop-ups and the "Restart to keep using Firefox" messages when I opened new tabs, so I switched over to Librewolf and now I get no distracting modals at all and can update it precisely when I feel like it.
Those tabs telling you to restart are because the OS upgraded Firefox in the background and Firefox detected that its files changed under it. It tells you to restart so you don't get buggy broken behavior if anything was incompatible between the two versions. Firefox's built-in update system waits for a natural browser restart so it doesn't do that.
