As Europe bakes in the throes of a deadly heatwave, residents living near the continent’s largest data center in Slough, a town just west of central London, UK, are enduring extreme temperatures.
As The Guardian reports, the enormous facility ten miles from London Heathrow is making the sweltering heat even more unbearable, with local residents likening the experience to something “pinching your body and burning your skin.” Weather station data revealed that temperatures near the facility have been several degrees higher this week — approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit — compared to the surrounding area.
To keep all of those computer chips cool, facilities like the one in Slough need to dump the heat using enormously resource-intensive cooling equipment. It’s so much extra energy that governments have suggested using it to heat thousands of homes in the winter.
In the context of a record-breaking summer heatwave, it’s a bitter pill to swallow for a public already extremely wary of data centers appearing in their backyards. The backlash to the trend has grown considerably, with critics citing surging electricity prices, low water pressure, and plenty of noise as reasons for opposition.
The research surrounding the effects data centers have on their immediate surroundings is still in its infancy. According to one yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper by researchers at Cambridge, data centers can spike temperatures by as much as 16 degrees Fahrenheit and an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit in their immediate vicinity by creating a “data heat island effect.”
More broadly, the heat island effect explains why developed areas experience higher temperatures due to the replacement of natural vegetation with heat-absorbing materials, like asphalt and concrete. Heat-expelling data centers could exacerbate the issue.
“Our results show that the data heat island effect could have a remarkable influence on communities and regional welfare in the future, hence becoming part of the conversation around environmentally sustainable AI worldwide,” the researchers concluded in their paper, estimating more than 340 million people could be affected.
The sprawling facility in Slough, one of the world’s biggest, provides computing power for some of the biggest tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
“Slough is almost like an experiment by itself in the sense that the new investments in data centers are bringing to life a new generation of data centers,” coauthor and Cambridge associate professor Andrea Marinoni told The Guardian.
In other words, we haven’t even begun to measure the real scale of the issue facing us today as the tech industry pours hundreds of billions of dollars into the construction of data centers.
“What we measured were what we…
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