On one hand: great!
On the other hand: the heat has to go somewhere. So… where? Datacenters already create a warm microclimate in their vicinity, is that getting even worse?
On one hand: great!
On the other hand: the heat has to go somewhere. So… where? Datacenters already create a warm microclimate in their vicinity, is that getting even worse?
This approach appears to directly reduce energy use (that's what the articles says). The heat would still be going into the local environment, but if there is a reduction in energy use, there should be less of it.
Actual heating due to human energy use is not really a big deal except perhaps locally. Climate change is caused by changing how much heat the earth retains from the sun. Maybe if we stopped using fossil fuels and used immense amounts of nuclear power, we would care about the waste heat. But solar and wind power largely redirect energy flows.
It’s kind of like how brine from desalination is not a global problem for the oceans at all — all that matters is diluting it enough that it doesn’t poison the local ecosystem.
I was specifically talking about the local microclimate. cf. https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-...
It's not clear to me what changes are happening here. The siblings to your post seem to be indicating an overall improvement.
This is kinda debunked / obviously false. It's almost entirely a land use issue: a building will create a heat island. Data centers aren't using enough energy to make a significant difference.
More on it at [0], but it doesn't take anything beyond a basic energy calculation to know that 1GW of energy is not going to have a significant effect "6.2 miles away".
[0] https://andymasley.com/writing/data-centers-heat-exhaust-is-...
Indeed. If the datacenter uses less total power, it produces less waste heat.
If you manage to use the waste heat to avoid generating heat somewhere else (that the article calls heat recovery) then there’s a further reduction in total heat output.
The temperature is independent of the actual heat flux. Also - a quick search suggests that at best the data center coolers run at COP of little more than 10. The inverse of that is the amount of heat wasted just on cooling. Having a system not relying on heat pumps would only make it better. A back of the envelope calculation based on PC AIOs suggests they would achieve a COP of 20 or more. A scaled up system would be more efficient than that, if not just for wider tubes.