15 ms·

Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers

313 points by cwwc 1mo ago

cocacola1 1mo ago
“Everyone in McKinney is dead”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc
- RSHEPP 1mo ago
  My first real job was in McKinney, sad to hear they are all dead.
nemomarx 1mo ago
Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?
- micromacrofoot 1mo ago
  industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
  - pnw 1mo ago
    It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
    - duped 1mo ago
      The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
      - pnw 1mo ago
        Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
        triceratops 1mo ago
        Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect." I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
        deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
        duped 1mo ago
        Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped. That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers. (* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)
        pnw 29d ago
        Which power utility do you use?
        estearum 1mo ago
        Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price? Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
  - nemomarx 1mo ago
    If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe? But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
    - micromacrofoot 1mo ago
      a couple things to note that complicate it: * a bunch of places didn't have the foresight to actually put buffers between industrial and residential zoned areas (either due to space limitations and/or poor planning)... sometimes people only notice when the empty lot they lived next to for a decade actually gets something built * currently some protests are whipping up enough fervor where location doesn't really factor, people are fighting against any data centers within city limits at all
  - jeffbee 1mo ago
    > I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- matherial 1mo ago
  Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
  - jeffbee 29d ago
    The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor" https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-programs/mesa-incentives-programs/elliot-road-technology-corridor/ https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- lokar 1mo ago
  When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer. I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now. For me, noise would be my first concern
jghn 1mo ago
All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1] [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?item=qt0148112&ref_=ext_shr_lnk https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?i...
jeffbee 1mo ago
"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. " Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.
- pnw 1mo ago
  You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
  - jeffbee 1mo ago
    It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing. Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.
duplessitous 1mo ago
> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at
- elictronic 1mo ago
  The title is correct. You are looking at average temperature rise. The article states by up to which is the maximum temperature rise. If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.
  - duplessitous 1mo ago
    Never said anything about correctness.
  - user43928 29d ago
    No it's not correct, because no causal relationship has been established between the data center and the most extreme difference measured. I understand that the study only showed that this was the maximum observed difference downwind of one data center during one run.
    - atoav 29d ago
      It is probably better to just thermodynamically ballpark the whole thing. How much energy goes in? Some percentage of that is gonna need to be radiated out either directly as IR radiation or by pushing a heated medium out (water, air). Someone did the math on that in the construction of the data center. It is completely understandable that it is in the interest of the public to enforce some limits on the resource use, radiation, etc on any building, be it a data center or not. And these limits ideally should take local, state-wide, national and global considerations into account.
kissiel 1mo ago
Reminder: 4 degrees = 0.0698131701 rad (article says 2.2 [C/K], btw)
ck2 1mo ago
so now we are speed-running global warming there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w and for what? so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved
- watwut 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- lbrito 1mo ago
  You haven't used the latest models! AGI is just around the corner! China! Russia!
- metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ck2 1mo ago
    how about the non-stop methane burnoff for months ("flare") from all the oil fracking fields in the US that can be seen from SPACE for the past DECADE * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/americas-oil-boom-is-visible-from-space/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/ameri... * https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drilling-north-dakota-79810/ https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drillin... that's already raising the local area temps, why not put that wasted fuel to work instead? build the datacenters literally next to the fracking fields, absolutely no-one there to complain, they all moved away already from the toxic air/water and there's already unlimited fuel
    - ipsum2 1mo ago
      You described the company Crusoe. They've been building datacenters that do exactly what you said. https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/blog/understanding-the-problem-crusoe-solves https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/blog/understanding-the-probl... > Crusoe has built their business around turning flaring from an operational and regulatory risk for oil and gas companies, as well as an existential risk for our planet, into a multi-solve solution. Crusoe doesn’t just mitigate flaring emissions. They capture the gas, convert it into energy, and use it to power computing infrastructure. Edit: Crusoe sold its bitcoin-mining operation including the Digital Flare Mitigation business to NYDIG in 2025, so the above may be inaccurate.
metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
The key is this says at distances up to 500m downwind. This is a nothing burger sorry
- bigbuppo 1mo ago
  Cool, I'll be putting big data ai machine learning data center in your back yard.
  - metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
    No one has ever built a full datacenter in someones backyard...
    - caconym_ 1mo ago
      gives a whole new meaning to 'vertical integration'
    - ndriscoll 1mo ago
      The referenced 169 MW location is literally across the street from a residential neighborhood, where the article indicates they measured temperature differences[0]. > This gap is significant because many facilities are sited adjacent to residential neighborhoods (Fig. 1), and their air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air at temperatures 8–14 °C above ambient—often exceeding 50 °C during Phoenix summers—with air velocities of 2–4 m/s [15,16], creating thermal plumes that are advected downwind over inhabited areas. For example, the Iron Mountain Data Center (Fig. 1(c)) has cooling equipment located less than 50 m from the nearest three-story apartment building. [0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/33.267398/-111.880313 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/33.267398/-111.880313
      - otterley 1mo ago
        I wonder why the local government allowed it to be built without a buffer zone.
atleastoptimal 1mo ago
The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?
- outside1234 1mo ago
  Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW
  - metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
    Yea decreasing them
- tintor 1mo ago
  Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
  - duplessitous 1mo ago
    Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution? The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States. There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
    - Groxx 1mo ago
      Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years. It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.
MSKJ 1mo ago
Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally. This is more of a zoning problem "...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"
varenc 1mo ago
Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas. But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.
- ndriscoll 1mo ago
  Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
  - trollbridge 1mo ago
    Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant. It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
- overfeed 1mo ago
  > But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc. The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county. Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal. 1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.
dwoldrich 1mo ago
I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?
- jrflo 1mo ago
  It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
  - bpodgursky 1mo ago
    The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
  - seibelj 1mo ago
    Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
    - dwoldrich 29d ago
      Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
  - goatlover 1mo ago
    Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything. Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.
xnx 1mo ago
Now compare to how much an asphalt parking lot raises temperatures.
- platevoltage 1mo ago
  Eagerly awaiting your report.
  - xnx 1mo ago
    During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F . A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roof-really-get-in-the-summer/ https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
    - platevoltage 29d ago
      That sounds like more of an argument to build green space, not data centers.
- HDBaseT 29d ago
  Parking lots don't generate heat, they just don't absorb it.
bdcravens 1mo ago
If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations. https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in-u-s-released-cancer-causing-benzene-above-epa-action-levels-in-2020/ https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in... https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic-pollution-as-business-starts-to-crumble/ https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...
- Lord-Jobo 1mo ago
  The group trying to do that got voted out of all majorities of power
- fulafel 1mo ago
  Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.
  - theideaofcoffee 1mo ago
    Won't someone think of the shareholders of the oil conglomerates? On second thought, fuck 'em. Let 'em burn.
  - whimsicalism 29d ago
    democracies will not vote for this. even in California, politicians run on policies like $500 gas rebates for anyone owning a gas powered vehicle
    - insane_dreamer 29d ago
      Biden had rebates for EVs which Trump killed so that EV sales would go down and gas sales would go up that's a pretty stark difference
    - fulafel 29d ago
      Democracies in EU are doing a lot more.
ansley 1mo ago
With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks? The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.
- Legend2440 1mo ago
  Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
- user43928 29d ago
  Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors. Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this: >I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy. Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world. If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice. The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.
fauria 1mo ago
4 degrees Fahrenheit: > "... air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C ..."
K0balt 1mo ago
A modern data center (1GW) is about the same as 140k additional cars in traffic in terms of direct heating. Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???
applicative 1mo ago
Are people thinking it is better to get AI from Xi?
thegrim33 1mo ago
If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts. I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
- Nicook 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bryan0 1mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tclancy 1mo ago
      I’ve been reading that same line for 15-20 years now.
      - bryan0 1mo ago
        Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.
        tclancy 29d ago
        Or perhaps your tastes have improved!
    - whimsicalism 29d ago
epistasis 1mo ago
Just wait until people hear about the temperature increases caused by parking lots....
empiricus 1mo ago
the fact ppl reading this are not lol-ing makes me sad.
spullara 1mo ago
this is within 500m of the datacenter. this is a deeply unserious problem. parking lots are probably a bigger contributor.
adamsb6 1mo ago
Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.
- whimsicalism 29d ago
  where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supply
  - margalabargala 29d ago
    Right, yes, if people want something studied, grants usually are made available to study it.
    - whimsicalism 29d ago
      i think we both know that this is not what i meant
      - margalabargala 29d ago
        HN guidelines are that I should choose the most generous interpretation of your comment, not the most likely one. It would be uncharitable and insulting to you to take your comment at face value.
        whimsicalism 29d ago
        HN guidelines also say something about flamebait but I guess you read past that part :) cheers, obviously not going to continue replying to you
        margalabargala 29d ago
        Right, but didn't that one go out the window with your original comment? People follow all the rules some of the time, and some of the rules all the time.
Ydarbleoj 1mo ago
These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy. Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.
- vmchale 1mo ago
  Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem. If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
  - archagon 29d ago
    Individual consumption is but a blip compared to industrial resource utilization.
    - vmchale 29d ago
      The industrial resource utilization is being done to serve the consumer. Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.
      - archagon 29d ago
        Very obviously, wagging your finger at consumers and hoping they change their behavior en masse will be far less effective than targeting the actual polluters directly. (Talk about motivated reasoning!)
thordenmark 1mo ago
This is like saying campfires raise nearby temperatures by up to 700°F – 900°F (370°C – 480°C) or so. We need to heavily regulate or even ban camping.
throwaway2037 29d ago
My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.
MengerSponge 29d ago
Can we also talk about the sheer madness of using single-cycle natural gas turbines to power these things? It's tragic.
- MC995 29d ago
  They don't though. At least not all, and not most of the newer ones. All of the DC designs I've worked on the last few years have all included heat absorption chillers driven by engine exhaust (for reciprocating engine power plants) and HRSGs with steam driven chillers for the turbine power plants.
  - MengerSponge 29d ago
    I'd love to be wrong, but I fear I'm not: https://www.wired.com/story/real-reason-data-center-gas-power-plants-are-so-dirty/ https://www.wired.com/story/real-reason-data-center-gas-powe... It's absurd, cruel, and criminal that any hyperscalers are using fossil fuels of any kind, much less simple cycle turbines.
cadamsdotcom 29d ago
Can we please state the measuring system in use. 4F is not enough to rise above a noise floor; 4C is getting close.
taf2 29d ago
[dead]
Rover222 29d ago
One almost milk latte uses more water than tens of thousands of Chat GPT requests, by the way. That's not an exaggeration. And plenty of anti-datacenter folks are sipping that every day.
1vuio0pswjnm7 29d ago
1779157026 | Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix | https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-centers-nearby-temperatures-degrees-phoenix.html https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-centers-nearby-temperatu... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188469
1vuio0pswjnm7 29d ago
No Javascript required: https://web.archive.org/web/20260519125520if_/https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/sustainablebuildings/article/doi/10.1115/1.4071922/1233035/Data-center-waste-heat-as-an-emerging-urban https://web.archive.org/web/20260519125520if_/https://asmedi...
bryan_w 29d ago
Imagine a steel mill trying to exist in America today...

313 points by cwwc 1mo ago

cocacola1 1mo ago

“Everyone in McKinney is dead”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzA8DcAiijc

RSHEPP 1mo ago
My first real job was in McKinney, sad to hear they are all dead.

nemomarx 1mo ago

Out of curiosity, how are large data centers zoned?

micromacrofoot 1mo ago
industry or heavy commercial, which is where some minor wrinkles have been coming up because they usually don't need special permission to build as long as the zoning fits honestly I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too, the nature of industrial zoning on its own tends to reduce green space which can lead to the heat island effect, so this is at least partially because hating on data centers is the issue du jour
- pnw 1mo ago
  It's the issue du jour because of foreign influence. The situation in Phoenix is due more to poor zoning since the DC is right across the street from a residential area. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-...
  - duped 1mo ago
    The Chinese and Russians didn't double my electricity rates this year.
    - pnw 1mo ago
      Neither did the data centers. Datacenters use less than 5% of US electricity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
      - triceratops 1mo ago
        Reading only the abstract: "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach... We caution that future supply constraints could reverse the effect." I've only heard about datacenter protests in the past 2 years. So perhaps what the authors warned about is happening now?
      - deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      - duped 1mo ago
        Data centers directly led to my rates increasing over the last ~6 months where several came online locally without supply increasing. Natural gas prices also impacted it, but the data center buildout over the last year has not helped. That article is two years out of date, and looking at nationwide electricity usage doesn't account for the local impacts of these data centers. (* nb4 "it's summer": talking about price per kWhr)
        pnw 29d ago
        Which power utility do you use?
      - estearum 1mo ago
        Is your implication that something responsible for 5% of the demand is responsible for 5% of the price? Because... that's not how prices work. And certainly not energy prices, which have both significant capex requirements, spot-market pricing dynamics, and capacity headroom requirements.
- nemomarx 1mo ago
  If they're zoned like heavy industry, that seems fine for any noise/ heat etc. If they're zoned for light industry or similar to office buildings like the other comment says I feel like that could have different impacts - an office building will have some of this but probably has much less equipment and energy needs, less venting heat out maybe? But if we're going to keep factories and chemical plants away from housing we can keep data centers over with them I think. Out of sight, out of mind, less chance of local protestors, maybe even closer to good power plants for transmission. Everyone wins?
  - micromacrofoot 1mo ago
    a couple things to note that complicate it: * a bunch of places didn't have the foresight to actually put buffers between industrial and residential zoned areas (either due to space limitations and/or poor planning)... sometimes people only notice when the empty lot they lived next to for a decade actually gets something built * currently some protests are whipping up enough fervor where location doesn't really factor, people are fighting against any data centers within city limits at all
- jeffbee 1mo ago
  > I'm sure other industrial uses can cause temperature increases too If anything about this paper is accurate, which it clearly is not, then the >8000MW rejected to the atmosphere from the nearby Palo Verde power station should be raising the air temperature at least 250C, 1km downwind. Which it obviously does not.
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matherial 1mo ago
Zoning is a per-city and per-county thing. Traditionally, they usually occupied some sort of commercial / light industrial zones, the same as office parks and warehouses. But hyperscale stuff often requires one-off variances / rezoning.
- jeffbee 29d ago
  The zoning for Mesa AZ is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The obviously unsustainable car-choked sprawl near NTT PH1 is listed in the growth plan as "sustain" while the industrial area is listed as "evolve". The industrial/commercial strip is between two sprawl neighborhoods. In the general plan the car-oriented cul-de-sac hellscape is noted to be "traditional residential" while the data center area is "regional employment". It appears online that the city of Mesa actively encourages data centers in their "technology corridor" https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-programs/mesa-incentives-programs/elliot-road-technology-corridor/ https://selectmesa.com/business-environment/incentives-progr...
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lokar 1mo ago
When I worked at a big cloud provider the large sites were either within an existing industrial area, or off by themselves with lots of buffer. I visited a few of them. They are loud, but there definitely no homes close enough to hear them. I’ve read this is sometimes not the case now. For me, noise would be my first concern

jghn 1mo ago

All I can think of when reading this was Hank Hill yelling at his neighbor: "Dale you giblet-head, we live in Texas, where it's already 110 in the summer. And if it gets one degree hotter I'm gonna kick your ass!" [1] [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?item=qt0148112&ref_=ext_shr_lnk https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0620288/characters/nm0362548/?i...

jeffbee 1mo ago

"The attribution of this warming to data center waste heat is supported by the consistent alignment of the temperature signal with the prevailing wind direction across multiple sites, dates, and meteorological conditions. " Well, no? That could also mean that the heat island effect of the (statutorily mandated) employee parking lot is causal.

pnw 1mo ago
You can look up the NTT PH1 Datacenter from the study on Google Maps. It doesn't have much of a parking lot but due to poor industrial zoning, it's right next to a residential suburb. It's basically a failure of urban planning.
- jeffbee 1mo ago
  It's in the middle of a large, disturbed area with big commercial buildings, roads, and parking lots, only some of which are data centers. This type of disturbance tends to get hot in the sun. But the larger question is how they are attributing the temperature at the end of the cul de sac to the data center when the somewhat more obvious reason for a hot spot there is that nothing shades it. That is, the measured cooler streets are shaded by the houses, but the edges of the neighborhood are shaded by nothing. Anyway the main problem with this paper is it does not have an explanation for why the response isn't linear. If areal density of heat rejection was able to raise air temperatures this amount, then nobody would be able to go anywhere near a thermal power station without being vaporized.

duplessitous 1mo ago

> The mean air temperature on the upwind side of the facility was approximately 42.7 °C, increasing to 43.5 °C in the neighborhood near the eastern boundary of the data center campus on the downwind side. The observed ΔT of approximately 0.8 °C extended roughly 500 m downwind Seems like we do observe heating but a much smaller average delta T than the title would hint at; I didn't see a max distance they evaluated over, seems like 500-1000m was their search window from their text. The next paragraph discusses how one of the sites they compare to is a relatively lower average temperate than the rest of Phoenix. Not really convinced by this methodology. Seems like doing something in a flat field with an array of temperature sensors would be a much more robust way to look at heating effects over some reasonable distance. Plenty of data centers fit the bill of flat and semi-isolated, curious why they chose these sites to look at

elictronic 1mo ago
The title is correct. You are looking at average temperature rise. The article states by up to which is the maximum temperature rise. If you catch me on fire my average temperature rise doesn't go up very much, but I have the barest of hints that it might have an impact.
- duplessitous 1mo ago
  Never said anything about correctness.
- user43928 29d ago
  No it's not correct, because no causal relationship has been established between the data center and the most extreme difference measured. I understand that the study only showed that this was the maximum observed difference downwind of one data center during one run.
  - atoav 29d ago
    It is probably better to just thermodynamically ballpark the whole thing. How much energy goes in? Some percentage of that is gonna need to be radiated out either directly as IR radiation or by pushing a heated medium out (water, air). Someone did the math on that in the construction of the data center. It is completely understandable that it is in the interest of the public to enforce some limits on the resource use, radiation, etc on any building, be it a data center or not. And these limits ideally should take local, state-wide, national and global considerations into account.

kissiel 1mo ago

Reminder: 4 degrees = 0.0698131701 rad (article says 2.2 [C/K], btw)

ck2 1mo ago

so now we are speed-running global warming there are now record setting gas turbine sales instead of solar/nuclear * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk8ziQCWK1w and for what? so we can have totally useless "AI" customer service agents where you still have to demand to talk to a human to properly get a problem solved

watwut 1mo ago
[flagged]
lbrito 1mo ago
You haven't used the latest models! AGI is just around the corner! China! Russia!
metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
[flagged]
- ck2 1mo ago
  how about the non-stop methane burnoff for months ("flare") from all the oil fracking fields in the US that can be seen from SPACE for the past DECADE * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/americas-oil-boom-is-visible-from-space/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/20/ameri... * https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drilling-north-dakota-79810/ https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/gas-drillin... that's already raising the local area temps, why not put that wasted fuel to work instead? build the datacenters literally next to the fracking fields, absolutely no-one there to complain, they all moved away already from the toxic air/water and there's already unlimited fuel
  - ipsum2 1mo ago
    You described the company Crusoe. They've been building datacenters that do exactly what you said. https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/blog/understanding-the-problem-crusoe-solves https://www.crusoe.ai/resources/blog/understanding-the-probl... > Crusoe has built their business around turning flaring from an operational and regulatory risk for oil and gas companies, as well as an existential risk for our planet, into a multi-solve solution. Crusoe doesn’t just mitigate flaring emissions. They capture the gas, convert it into energy, and use it to power computing infrastructure. Edit: Crusoe sold its bitcoin-mining operation including the Digital Flare Mitigation business to NYDIG in 2025, so the above may be inaccurate.

metalsiliconYT 1mo ago

The key is this says at distances up to 500m downwind. This is a nothing burger sorry

bigbuppo 1mo ago
Cool, I'll be putting big data ai machine learning data center in your back yard.
- metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
  No one has ever built a full datacenter in someones backyard...
  - caconym_ 1mo ago
    gives a whole new meaning to 'vertical integration'
  - ndriscoll 1mo ago
    The referenced 169 MW location is literally across the street from a residential neighborhood, where the article indicates they measured temperature differences[0]. > This gap is significant because many facilities are sited adjacent to residential neighborhoods (Fig. 1), and their air-cooled condenser arrays discharge air at temperatures 8–14 °C above ambient—often exceeding 50 °C during Phoenix summers—with air velocities of 2–4 m/s [15,16], creating thermal plumes that are advected downwind over inhabited areas. For example, the Iron Mountain Data Center (Fig. 1(c)) has cooling equipment located less than 50 m from the nearest three-story apartment building. [0] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/33.267398/-111.880313 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/33.267398/-111.880313
    - otterley 1mo ago
      I wonder why the local government allowed it to be built without a buffer zone.

atleastoptimal 1mo ago

The whole data center heat/water thing is like not even in the top 100 risks/issues related to AI, but it's all people seem to care about. Why is that?

outside1234 1mo ago
Because they are hitting people's water and electricity bills (and or ability to get either at all) RIGHT NOW
- metalsiliconYT 1mo ago
  Yea decreasing them
tintor 1mo ago
Because these new data centers were built near people's homes.
- duplessitous 1mo ago
  Right, but even then, why would we not discuss noise pollution? The water figure folks cite is wildly manipulated, it really confuses me why a known piece of misinformation is so routinely used. Water usage for global data center cooling is under 30B gallons of water. You only get to the 300B number by including the estimated water required for the power generation. Data centers are the only technology where we include estimated water usage for power generation under general water requirement. And even with that fudging, global water usage by data centers is a magnitude less water than just the leaky pipes in the United States. There are much stronger points to be made without resorting to misinformation. I think points around zoning + noise pollution is something that everyone, besides our most ardent AI stan, can get behind. Every pro-ai person I know are all pretty happy to say that data center should not be built in residential zoning
  - Groxx 1mo ago
    Noise pollution is definitely being discussed: https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2... There are many reasons to not like these things nearby (anywhere it affects power or water too). And on top of that they've been "somehow" getting massive incentives and tax cuts, despite bringing in very little money or employment, which costs the area even more in future years. It's everything combined, and pushback has been somewhat successful. Success in a protest tends to help bring more success to the same protest elsewhere.

MSKJ 1mo ago

Interesting, as we increase our total global power consumption, losses in the form of heat will increase proportionally. This is more of a zoning problem "...downwind air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C, with average downwind air temperatures 0.7–0.9 °C warmer than corresponding upwind areas. Thermal signatures were detectable at distances up to 500 m from facility perimeters"

varenc 1mo ago

Using energy always raises nearby temperatures since all energy becomes heat. If any facility is using 36 MW of electricity, then 36 MW of heat is going to be entering the environment somewhere. Though I think what's interesting here is that the effects of this extra heat is highly localized to urban areas. But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment.

ndriscoll 1mo ago
Not necessarily; a building satisfied by its own rooftop solar should be roughly heat neutral since that energy was already there. The problem is with the power density these buildings imply, requiring energy movement. Everyone could run Qwen 3.8 27B at home with a solar panel and it'd make no difference. Companies could run their traditional servers on-site at their offices, etc.
- trollbridge 1mo ago
  Not quite. If the roof were highly reflective and it's a clear sky, it would reflect sunlight (including infrared) back into space. Of course, we're talking about such minimal levels of power here compared to, say, heating a house in the winter that it's irrelevant. It needs around 300 W to run Qwen 3.8-27b here, which is roughly eqivalent to me as a human walking around and doing basically anything other than sitting still.
overfeed 1mo ago
> But just trying to say this isn't data center specific. A steel mill with 36MW of electric arc furnaces is going to release the same 36MW of heat into the general environment The subtext is broken social contracts[1]. A 36MW steel mill is loud, hot and polluting, but it is tolerated because it makes up for the ills by employing a lot of locals and positively contributing to the local economy (housing, retail, food and beverage), etc. The AI CEOs thought it'd be a good idea to hype their products by promising to take people's jobs away, and people remember that when a new data center proposal pops up in their town/county. Circling back to your generalization: if an equivalent 36MW steel mill flew in workers from Canada/Mexico for each shift - or somehow implemented 99.5% tele-operation by Ghanaian workers, locals would grouse about the pollution and noise because they can identify a raw deal. 1. Americans have been fed up with powerful people getting away with violating social norms for 2 decades - if not longer, sometimes with a partisan tinge, oft-times without. It's the common thread linking the Tea party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Bros, Trump I, BLM protests, the Epstein files legislation and release, cutting down of Flock cameras and the ire against AI and AI data centers.

dwoldrich 1mo ago

I cannot figure out if this data center panic is legit or trumped up. There are legitimate nation-state and political entities that would love to create pressure for degrowth in this area. And, pollution and natural resources are a concern, yes, fine, sure. NIMBY happens, I get it ... *BUT*, we've been building huge data centers for decades and they are minuscule compared to the size of the earth. My skeptic meter maxed out when i saw a Tesla with a "End Data Centers" bumper sticker on it. This is just the latest popular panic, isn't it?

jrflo 1mo ago
It's just the outrage story of the month. There will be some new moral panic in September and we'll all move on. The attention span for topics like this on social media is quite short.
- bpodgursky 1mo ago
  The risk is that reacting to the panic, states lock in laws with destructive moratoriums they politically can't back out of later.
- seibelj 1mo ago
  Remember when people spent hours on the weekend protesting Tesla dealerships. I guess they protected us from whatever it was. Can’t remember anymore
  - dwoldrich 29d ago
    Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
- goatlover 1mo ago
  Tell that to the people who have to live next to them and all the people going on about how AI is going to change everything. Some outrages are based on real things. Not everything is a moral panic. It's like saying the Epstein victims (for example) are just a moral panic because society refuses to hold the rich and powerful accountable and the news cycle moves on.

xnx 1mo ago

Now compare to how much an asphalt parking lot raises temperatures.

platevoltage 1mo ago
Eagerly awaiting your report.
- xnx 1mo ago
  During peak sunlight conditions, a standard black asphalt surface will readily absorb solar radiation, sending its surface temperature to 150°F–190°F . A clean white roof reflects up to 80% of sunlight, and topping out at around 95°F–115°F. (https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roof-really-get-in-the-summer/ https://sentryroof.com/news/how-hot-does-your-commercial-roo...)
  - platevoltage 29d ago
    That sounds like more of an argument to build green space, not data centers.
HDBaseT 29d ago
Parking lots don't generate heat, they just don't absorb it.

bdcravens 1mo ago

If only we had the same amount of concern about oil refineries and gas stations. https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in-u-s-released-cancer-causing-benzene-above-epa-action-levels-in-2020/ https://environmentalintegrity.org/news/13-oil-refineries-in... https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic-pollution-as-business-starts-to-crumble/ https://www.theenergymix.com/gas-stations-leave-behind-toxic...

Lord-Jobo 1mo ago
The group trying to do that got voted out of all majorities of power
fulafel 1mo ago
Fossils use, production and trade needs to be rapidly ramped down to mitigate the climate catastrophe and resulting megadeaths on all fronts.
- theideaofcoffee 1mo ago
  Won't someone think of the shareholders of the oil conglomerates? On second thought, fuck 'em. Let 'em burn.
- whimsicalism 29d ago
  democracies will not vote for this. even in California, politicians run on policies like $500 gas rebates for anyone owning a gas powered vehicle
  - insane_dreamer 29d ago
    Biden had rebates for EVs which Trump killed so that EV sales would go down and gas sales would go up that's a pretty stark difference
  - fulafel 29d ago
    Democracies in EU are doing a lot more.

ansley 1mo ago

With all the data centers being built - who is using all of this compute? Am i really underestimating how demanding it is to be using ChatGPT or whatever for basic tasks? The benefit to effort ratio seems fishy to me.

Legend2440 1mo ago
Coding agents are increasingly popular right now, and they can use millions of reasoning tokens per hour. Basic ChatGPT queries hardly use any tokens by comparison.
user43928 29d ago
Even at today's demand Anthropic and OpenAI often return 'model overloaded' errors. Amodei, who used to research cancer biomarkers at Stanford, said this: >I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years Pessimists are going to say he is lying or crazy. Given the trajectory of progress over the last year, I do not see where they get the confidence to say with certainty that AI will not change the world. If there is even a small chance for the biomedical breakthroughs mentioned, this to me justifies any data center buildout, a hundred times over, and I still would not need to think twice. The benefit to effort ratio is great already today, and the upside basically has no known limit.

fauria 1mo ago

4 degrees Fahrenheit: > "... air temperature warming as high as 2.2 °C ..."

K0balt 1mo ago

A modern data center (1GW) is about the same as 140k additional cars in traffic in terms of direct heating. Seems more likely that the heating is climate change driven primarily. But, 140k cars 24/7 is a lot of cars, so???

applicative 1mo ago

Are people thinking it is better to get AI from Xi?

thegrim33 1mo ago

If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts. I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.

Nicook 1mo ago
[flagged]
- bryan0 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tclancy 1mo ago
    I’ve been reading that same line for 15-20 years now.
    - bryan0 1mo ago
      Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.
      - tclancy 29d ago
        Or perhaps your tastes have improved!
  - whimsicalism 29d ago

epistasis 1mo ago

Just wait until people hear about the temperature increases caused by parking lots....

empiricus 1mo ago

the fact ppl reading this are not lol-ing makes me sad.

spullara 1mo ago

this is within 500m of the datacenter. this is a deeply unserious problem. parking lots are probably a bigger contributor.

adamsb6 1mo ago

Something smells wrong. You could dump a gigawatt into resistive heating and not see such temperature rises so far away.

whimsicalism 29d ago
where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supply
- margalabargala 29d ago
  Right, yes, if people want something studied, grants usually are made available to study it.
  - whimsicalism 29d ago
    i think we both know that this is not what i meant
    - margalabargala 29d ago
      HN guidelines are that I should choose the most generous interpretation of your comment, not the most likely one. It would be uncharitable and insulting to you to take your comment at face value.
      - whimsicalism 29d ago
        HN guidelines also say something about flamebait but I guess you read past that part :) cheers, obviously not going to continue replying to you
        margalabargala 29d ago
        Right, but didn't that one go out the window with your original comment? People follow all the rules some of the time, and some of the rules all the time.

Ydarbleoj 1mo ago

These comments are full of the "but you participate in society" fallacy. Data centers can do a thing positively and yet have negative impacts that should be discussed. It's not that hard.

vmchale 1mo ago
Americans are quite fond of frivolous consumption that damages the environment. People who go apoplectic at the suggestion that they put down the hamburger are part of the problem. If the our world in data report is correct, "AI" data centers (apparently metaphysically morally inferior to noble pornhub servers) are just a scapegoat: https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-and-artificial-intelligence-use https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-energy-do-data-centers-a...
- archagon 29d ago
  Individual consumption is but a blip compared to industrial resource utilization.
  - vmchale 29d ago
    The industrial resource utilization is being done to serve the consumer. Pinning carbon emissions on a steel mill (which sells to airplane manufacturers who take people on vacation flights) is logically incoherent and motivated reasoning.
    - archagon 29d ago
      Very obviously, wagging your finger at consumers and hoping they change their behavior en masse will be far less effective than targeting the actual polluters directly. (Talk about motivated reasoning!)

thordenmark 1mo ago

This is like saying campfires raise nearby temperatures by up to 700°F – 900°F (370°C – 480°C) or so. We need to heavily regulate or even ban camping.

throwaway2037 29d ago

My first thought: Phoenix is a large city. Google maps tells me that it is north-to-south is about 38km, and west-to-east about 28km. Plus, it seamlessly blends into other cities to the west and east, similar to Los Angeles County (it is endless!). The headline is wildly overstated. Literally, they are measuring residential neighborhoods built next to large data centers. Yeah, no shit Sherlock. If I built housing next to some industrial plant that emits lots of heat, the same effect would probably occur. The reality of people living in a place that experiences summertime temperatures of forty-five degrees Celcius, your enormous air conditioning unit will just work a little bit harder. You spent hardly anytime outside during weather like that. If anything, this just sounds like bad land zoning laws in Phoenix. The intent of this peer-reviewed study seems suspicious to me.

MengerSponge 29d ago

Can we also talk about the sheer madness of using single-cycle natural gas turbines to power these things? It's tragic.

MC995 29d ago
They don't though. At least not all, and not most of the newer ones. All of the DC designs I've worked on the last few years have all included heat absorption chillers driven by engine exhaust (for reciprocating engine power plants) and HRSGs with steam driven chillers for the turbine power plants.
- MengerSponge 29d ago
  I'd love to be wrong, but I fear I'm not: https://www.wired.com/story/real-reason-data-center-gas-power-plants-are-so-dirty/ https://www.wired.com/story/real-reason-data-center-gas-powe... It's absurd, cruel, and criminal that any hyperscalers are using fossil fuels of any kind, much less simple cycle turbines.

cadamsdotcom 29d ago

Can we please state the measuring system in use. 4F is not enough to rise above a noise floor; 4C is getting close.

taf2 29d ago

[dead]

Rover222 29d ago

One almost milk latte uses more water than tens of thousands of Chat GPT requests, by the way. That's not an exaggeration. And plenty of anti-datacenter folks are sipping that every day.

1vuio0pswjnm7 29d ago

1779157026 | Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix | https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-centers-nearby-temperatures-degrees-phoenix.html https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-centers-nearby-temperatu... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188469

1vuio0pswjnm7 29d ago

No Javascript required: https://web.archive.org/web/20260519125520if_/https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/sustainablebuildings/article/doi/10.1115/1.4071922/1233035/Data-center-waste-heat-as-an-emerging-urban https://web.archive.org/web/20260519125520if_/https://asmedi...

bryan_w 29d ago

Imagine a steel mill trying to exist in America today...