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.