The AI race heating up has taken on a more literal meaning.
Using a dataset of land surface temperatures produced by NASA, a research team led by the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge found from 2004 to 2024, the surrounding areas of more than 6,000 data centers worldwide saw an average increased land temperature of about 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In certain cases, nearby temperatures increased 9 degrees Celsius, or 16.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers calculated these heat islands could be felt about 6.2 miles away from facilities, impacting up to 343 million people globally.
“The data heat island effect could have a remarkable influence on communities and regional welfare in the future,” the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, said.
“The income and spending drags will likely be larger for lower-income households because electricity accounts for a greater share of their spending, as well as for households in areas with higher concentrations of data centers where regional power markets will tighten more,” Goldman Sachs economists Manuel Abecasis and Hongcen Wei wrote in a note to clients in February.
As AI infrastructure expansion grows, so too do the financial and environmental risks associated with it.
Researchers, however, see a path forward to mitigate the heat island effect of AI infrastructure. They propose software-based solutions that increase the efficiency of computational methods and thus require less energy. Hardware-based solutions include improvements to integrated circuitry, or the structure of the chips themselves, to aid in energy recovery, as well as implementing hybrid cooling systems that combine “liquid cooling at the chip level with system-wide air cooling.”
“Although the impact of data heat islands can be intense (as has been previously discussed),” the recent Cambridge study said, “advances in technology in the semiconductor and energy material industries, as well as methodological developments in computer science and electrical engineering, can be used to mitigate their effects.”
