New environmental drama: AI data centers can heat surroundings by almost 10°C

Hundreds of millions of people live close enough to data centers used to power AI to experience (much) higher average temperatures in their local area.

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

The number of data centers built around the world is expected to increase sharply.

As cited by , JLL, a real estate company, estimates that data center capacity will double between 2025 and 2030 – and AI is expected to represent half of this demand.

The amount of energy required to operate a data center has been increasing steadily. Therefore, in a study recently arXivresearchers at the University of Cambridge wanted to quantify the impact.

The researchers used satellite measurements of Earth’s surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them with the geographic coordinates of more than 8,400 AI data centers.

Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located far from densely populated areas.

They found that ground surface temperatures increased by an average of 2°C in the months after an AI data center began operations. In the most extreme cases, the temperature increase was 9.1°C.

The effect was not limited to the immediate vicinity of data centers: the team found temperature increases up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30% reduction in intensity.

A autonomous community of Aragon, in Spainfor example, recorded a temperature increase of 2°C in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that, according to researchers, could not be explained in any other way.