I sometimes work in the building that's in the thumbnail of the article, that's crazy to see.
But that being said, data centers are definitely a negative for the environment and using them for bogus AI nonsense is horrible.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Strikingly, the impacts weren’t limited to a data center’s immediate surroundings; temperature increases affected areas up to 6.2 miles away, the research found, affecting more than 340 million people.
Huh?
Yeah. Press X to doubt on this
Air and water move, especially when heated.
But un a radius of 6 mi? That sounds a bit high.
More close to a city with lots of concrete to store the heat.
Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that's equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.
Edit: and keep in mind, that's HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that's heating for over 600,000 people.
Sorry to nitpick but doesn't 100% of it end up as heat? Vibrations, light, sounds, radio waves- all a tiny fraction of the power are also eventually absorbed by the environment.
That was my understanding at least
Yeah but will that happen in the 6M radius that we are talking about?
The graphs in the paper show the temperature 1 km away from the data center being 8°C higher and attribute that to heat emitted by the data center. That should start the alarm bells that something isn't right with this paper.
Here's a post going into the problems with it;
If that 16° in foreign members or freedom units?
Lol I thought Celsius, would've been hell. It's in Farenheit
That's still ~9°C, which is a lot.
Just need 1 km wide copper heatsinks
Where do you think the heat from that heatsink eventually goes? The only way to get "rid" of it is into the air or the water.
Coming to a neighborhood near you, bringing the noise, heat, and higher electric bills.
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Oh, 16 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, thats quite a bit.
Only a handful of countries use Fahrenheit, but they're still too arrogant to add the unit. I get not including Celsius because of the target audience, and dropping the unit in conversation but this isn't that
metric is so much more simpler,
For temperature, not really. Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are useful for different things.
Fahrenheit is great for what we feel (it's related to body temperature for the high end, and the freezing point of brine on 0).
Celsius is great for cooking, or applications where you care about what water is doing (0 is freezing, 100 is boiling).
Neither uses different scales, like other metric units increasing by 10s (at least, I've never seen anything like kC). If you're doing that, you're using Kelvin, which is a fundamental base temperature, where 0 is actually 0, which makes more sense for physics and math, but is less useful for what we feel.
I think the US should switch, just to make it easier to communicate, and other metric scales actually are better. C and F are both equally useful for different things though. Neither is actually a better scale.
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Years ago, I was driving through NY city-ish. We pulled over in a rest area and I saw a sign about turning your engine off. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, as did many other people apparently as their cars were idling. Then I got out of my car. I was wrong. The heat was insane. I couldn’t wrap my little head around it. I started doing the engineer math thing because it didn’t make sense.
Doesn’t surprise me at all these massive data centers are creating little heat domes. The cars were bad enough, and they are a fraction of the energy.
100% of electricity burned turns to heat save light that leaves earth. Gigawatt data center? That's ~650,000 1500w space heaters.
i work for a large power company, we have a data center customer that have as many equally sized cooling towers as one of our nuclear power plants.
Pretty soon you’ll just have nuclear plants just to power data centers.
You'll need the same number of cooling towers for the computers too. All the energy created by the reactor will turn into heat, essentially doubling the amount of cooling needed.
Didn't Microsoft try to pay for a nuclear plant to be recommissioned just to power a data centre or something?
There have been several data centers that have bought nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island, they're going to fire that bitch back up, also the Regulators have been disempowered. Propublica on the last part if I recall.
something tells me Datancenters power needs will exceed that of old nuclear plants, since they are tyring to expand.
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Would be nice if they built them in cold climates and piped the heat to houses and buildings like the steam era of old.
This would require investment in infrastructure, which is a completely foreign concept to american politicians when it's not about adding one more lane
"Like the steam era of old"? 🤣
What you're describing is called district heating and is totally a thing in Europe. There actually are data centers in Europe that contribute to their local district heating grid.
Yep it's how I heat my place, though 40-60% of the heat still comes from natural gas unfortunately.
Tax them enough to install geothermal heat pumps in the surrounding homes.
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I'm not sure what you guys are worried about. All that extra heat will just dissipate into the atmosphere and eventually radiate into space. It's not like there's anything in the atmosphere that would interfere with this cycle... right?
couldnt be those pesky gases that likes to trap and reflect heat could it?
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That's fucking insane.
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