Data centers heat up cities.

Another heat source for technology.

There is an invisible consequence of artificial intelligence that few people are noticing, as we discuss algorithms or robots and supercomputers, the physical infrastructure that sustains this entire revolution begins to literally alter the temperature of cities.

Researchers from Arizona State University discovered something worrying, data centers are raising the temperatures of entire neighborhoods around Phoenix in the United States, in some points the recorded increase reached close to 2 degrees, it may seem little at first glance, but in regions that already live with extreme heat, that difference changes many things.

The researchers decided to directly measure the thermal impact in the “data centers” in real time. To do this, they installed high-precision sensors in vehicles and visited areas near large facilities between June and October 2025. The objective was simple, to compare the air temperature before and after passing through the data centers. The results showed a clear pattern, the areas close to the facilities presented a constant increase in temperature, especially in a radius of approximately 500 m.

Cooling systems need to expel that heat

And this occurs due to the very nature of modern computing, because data centers basically function as gigantic machines to transform electricity into heat, thousands of sensors operating continuously generate absurd amounts of thermal energy, then, the cooling systems need to expel that heat constantly to prevent overheating of the machines and the volume is impressive, according to the study, a single data center can produce more waste heat than tens of thousands of homes combined.

The air released by the cooling systems comes out many degrees above the ambient temperature, forming true invisible thermal plumes around the facilities. The capacity of North American data centers should more than double by 2030, driven mainly by the artificial intelligence race, that means more servers, more energy consumption and potentially more urban thermal impact.