AI Data Centres Can Warm Surrounding Areas by up to 9.1°C

Data centres built to power AIs produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees – creating so-called data centre heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people.

The number of data centres built around the world is forecast to rise enormously. JLL, a real estate company, estimates that data centre capacity will double between 2025 and 2030 – with AI expected to account for half that demand.

Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact.