A server is a good choice because it already has a battery backup, so it can stay online even in the event of a power outage. For gaming laptops it’s not an ideal fate since they usually have a GPU and I don’t think most people have a reason to put that to good use in a server, so it’ll just sit there unused.

This site has a huge list of community supported things you can run on a server with instructions + (relatively) little effort.

Edit: just had an idea for the gpu: if it’s powerful enough, you may be able to use it for Stable Diffusion. Look up “A1111 stable diffusion web ui”. It’s not the easiest thing to install, but it’s a cool use case.