So I'm seeing this article from NewScientist going around here too, and I'm begging people to use their critical thinking skills for just one minute. This article is misinformation, it is correlation without causation, and honestly, New Scientist should be ashamed at publishing it.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2521256-ai-data-centres-can-warm-surrounding-areas-by-up-to-9-1c/
They've now put it behind their paywall, it's quite literally clickbait to convert people to subscribers. Let's look at some of the claims:
”Marinoni says that areas including the Bajío region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2°C (3.6°F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn’t otherwise be explained.“
I can think of one very easy reason why temperatures in these two regions may have gotten warmer, and it's not data centres: climate change.
We know that climate change on average increased temperatures 1-2°c, meaning some areas saw higher increases than others.
As someone else called out "the Bajio region has a metric fucktonne of oil processing in Salamanca and is a plateau region ringed by mountains so yeah"
yeah, I'm sure it was the data centres and uh, definitely not those oil refineries.
In the most extreme case, the researchers said "temperatures increased by 9.1°C", now, unless we're talking about Elon Musk's data centres which are breaking EPA rules by using multiple truck-sized gas turbine generators, maybe there's another reason for this increase?
Let's have a think about where datacenters are built: they tend to be built on greenfield sites, because that is where land is cheapest.
Once one datacenter moves in, other providers usually follow, so we're looking at temperature increase data for land that has gone from literally being a green field with trees, to a concrete, asphalt roads, and metal roofs with very little green space nor tree coverage.
We know the built environment without tree coverage causes the urban heat island effect, where neighborhoods in the same city with and without tree coverage show significantly different temperatures.
"The urban heat island effect can make the country's most populated cities 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than nearby areas" – CBS News explaining heat island effect.
