New Delhi: Heat generated from upcoming data centres can lead to a 4 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2.2 degrees Celsius rise in the temperature of neighbourhoods, found a study by researchers at Arizona State University.
The paper, ‘Data Center Waste Heat as an Emerging Urban Thermal Hazard: First Field Measurements of Neighborhood-Scale Air Temperature Impacts’ was published on 18 May in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities.
The recent discourse in the world of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning speaks of datacentres as an inevitability because of the high computational demands of AI. However, the cons of such datacentres, including the usage of water for cooling and the heat radiating from them, are far less studied.
“As we do more measurements under different kinds of atmospheric conditions, I think we’re going to see more significant impacts around data centres,” lead author of the study, David Sailor, said in a press release.
Heat hazards
Sailor, one of the world’s top climate experts, and the director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University, has highlighted that data centres consume massive amounts of energy. What they emit in return is waste heat.
“A single 169 MW data centre campus rejects waste heat equivalent to that emitted by nearly 200,000 households, concentrated in an area equivalent to less than a few hundred residential parcels,” Sailor wrote in a LinkedIn post.
When Sailor and his team studied temperatures around four data centres in Phoenix, Arizona, one of the hottest cities in the US, they found that winds were carrying the wasted heat nearly 500m around the facilities.
“We found downwind warming over large areas on the order of 0.8 °C (1.5 °F), reaching more than 2.2 °C (4 °F) in places,” Sailor said. While other studies have tried using data from satellites to gauge the heat impact of data centres, this is the first study to measure air temperatures downwind and upwind of data centres.
To conduct the study, researchers set up high-accuracy temperature sensors on cars that drove around Phoenix data centres and nearby neighbourhoods from 18 June to 25 October 2025.
“Even if these data centres only contribute to an additional heat island magnitude of one degree or two degrees, that can still have a very significant impact on our lives,” Sailor said.
The study explains that even if overall temperatures rise by 1 °C, it is likely to drive up the use of air conditioning, which itself emits waste heat into the surroundings.
These findings also come at a time when another study by researchers at North Carolina State University has found that electricity demands from data centres are likely to increase power costs.
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More data centres, higher power costs
Researchers found that while the demand for electricity had been fairly similar for the past 20 years, the last couple of years saw a sudden increase, which they attributed to the rise of data centres.
The paper, ‘Power system costs and emissions from data center and cryptocurrency mining expansion in the United States’, was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. It highlights that as the demand for power increases, there will be a corresponding increase in carbon dioxide emissions too.
“Our findings highlight the need for regulators and utilities to make informed decisions about near-term power generation, and for government officials at all levels to make informed decisions related to the construction of data centers,” said Jeremiah Johnson, corresponding author of the study, in a press release.