> I'm not aware of any large-scale heat recovery projects from data centers.
I don't know what you'd call large-scale, but the school I went to was entirely heated by the datacenter across the road and the DC still had plenty of heat to spare. Afaik they heat all of Science Park Amsterdam with the Equinix DC just to the east: https://osm.org/go/0E6VOVkQc-. I think it was a requirement of the local government that this waste product be reused. Amsterdam has also had a datacenter stop due to power supply issues.
Edit: this seems to be the press release (only source I could find): https://www.equinix.com/newsroom/press-releases/pr/122801/eq... "Third data center in amsterdam" matches that this DC is called Equinix AM3, and it says "Excess heat from the data center will be used to warm nearby buildings and for other third-party uses."
Not to say that this happens with all the data centers across the world, but if using a decent chunk of a DC's waste heat isn't a large-scale heat recovery project, then I'm not sure what would be.