Thinking that there has got to be a better way that funneling the heat up just to be cooled.
I'm not sure that there's enough heat generated to actually be harnessed to do something else. Generally, harnessing the power of heat involves heating water. That may help you come up with some other ideas. I doubt that the servers will heat the water above its boiling point though (which would create a physical force in an upward direction). Other than that, the heat could be used to heat something else. The problem is, and generally always is with recycling, will it be more efficient and/or save money? You could pump the heat to your water heaters but that won't save money. You could pump the heat to your coffee makers but that won't save money either. Heating water is most likely your best bet though.
Unless it's really hot, you can heat pipe it all together and possibly drive a stirling engine with it, but it would create so little energy, it wouldn't be worth the effort.
for a picture of the outside of the datacenter with cooling tower on the roof. They have other datacenters around the world.
Heat from servers is a very low-value energy source, it would be difficult and expensive to try to turn it into mechanical energy to make reclaimed power. You could use it directly as a winter heating source, but other than that, I am not sure how economical it would be to capture. One thing to note, many server farms have a large air conditioned room they stored in. Some people are proposing to (and may have already done this) enclose the server cabinets and to pump cool air into them so you do not have to cool the entire room, saving energy.
Like the Prius? Unfortunately, no way. What the Prius is doing is, in effect, using a motor backwards so that it works as a generator. It has roughly the same efficiency in driving mode (electrical energy --> motor --> mechanical energy) as it does in regen mode (mechanical energy --> generator --> electrical energy). This is not to say that the waste heat from a bank of servers cannot be recovered -- but it's going to be much harder to get much useful energy out of it. It could be funneled to a heat exchanger that would put it into a volume of water, but the delta T is low, so it is hard to get useful energy out of it. Better might be to use the hot exhaust air to directly heat a building; in a cold climate, to the extent it replaced burning fossil fuel to heat the building, it would represent pure savings. But to convert it back to electricity like a Prius, not really. There is just no good way to convert low-delta-T heat to electricity, unfortunately.
