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?
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
428 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
83264 readers
4936 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
Just need 1 km wide copper heatsinks
If that 16° in foreign members or freedom units?
Lol I thought Celsius, would've been hell. It's in Farenheit
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;
Coming to a neighborhood near you, bringing the noise, heat, and higher electric bills.
The noise is the bigger deal.
Have seen the Benn Jordan video?
Demolish all this useless shit to the ground.
But won't someone think of the TechnoFeudalists!
Think of all the money they can't spent on hedonism and depravity!
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,
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yeah it got me too haha
Would be nice if they built them in cold climates and piped the heat to houses and buildings like the steam era of old.
Tax them enough to install geothermal heat pumps in the surrounding homes.
No one uses in ground heat pumps, especially not existing units where you have to dig up the yard, but regular air source heat pumps are still good enough by far.
In-ground pumps are better, they're just very expensive, hence the taxes.
Can they capture that heat and recycle it to partially power the site?
They could use it to provide energy for the residents in closer proximity to it (in winter)
That's what some are already doing.
In Germany I heard about an indoor swimming pool using datacenter heat energy to heat their pools.
Not really, it's only useful if you intentionally capture it at the point of heat and Transfer that in a liquid still hot to take it a central point, by the time the fans cool of and the heat is pumped out the building it's too dispersed to use. Unless you're in a cold area and low grade heat can be used for warming.
Why don't we just invent an entropy reversing machine?
Lol I admire your courage to even think reversing the second law of thermodynamics.
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.
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
That's fucking insane.
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?
And we would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling fossil fuels, and cows too!
load more comments
(1 replies)
We could soon heat entire countries with the heat from these doomsday factories
Its not enough. Donate fire to a nearby data center today to improve its temperature!
view more: next ›