AI data centers can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1 degrees Celsius

Data centers built to power AI produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees—creating so-called data center heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people. Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data center had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, and set out to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centers. Recognising that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas. They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2°C (3.6°F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1°C (16.4°F). The effect wasn’t limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centers: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometres away. Seven kilometres away, there was only a 30 per cent reduction in the intensity.