-snip-

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.

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 centres. Recognising that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centres 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 centre 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 centres: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometres away. Seven kilometres away, there was only a 30 per cent reduction in the intensity.

-snip-