What links cows and datacenters?

Researchers at HP claim that "America’s dairy farmers could soon find themselves in the computer business, with the manure from their cows possibly powering the vast data centers of companies like Google and Microsoft".



According to HP’s calculations, 10,000 cows could fuel a 1 MW data center, which would be the equivalent of a small computing center used by a bank. Going one step further, they also claim that the heat produced by data center equipments could also be used to power biogas plants which require heat.