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Zkuq 1 day ago
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CaptainExplosion said:
Zkuq said:

Maybe my sense of scale is wrong, but I seriously doubt data centers could affect climate in any meaningful way. Maybe in some dystopian scenario they could, but that would probably require at least decades, or more likely centuries - and with the current climate awareness (as flawed as it is), I doubt we're ever going to go that far.

But I have heard reports of data centers having heat island effects in their vicinity and harmful emissions, like using diesel or gas generators just to keep some data centers running.

Yeah, but I bet it's caused by the data centers - the surrounding climate/environment still 'tries' to cool down the data center, the data center just is able to locally warm up the vicinity despite that. It probably has a diminishing effect on the larger area, and I bet the larger surrounding are does indeed somewhat cool down the data center as well. I'm not expert, but I have a really hard time believing that data centers could 'permanently' change their surroundings - it would all still rely on the data center providing the extra heat.

Now if you have a lot of data centers close to each other - very densely, I mean - that's probably more significant. It'll still be the same thing, but the data centers will also heat each other. I bet data centers aren't commonly built close to each other though - precisely because of that. Data center owners want the upkeep to be as low as possible, so they probably try to avoid the vicinity of other data centers if possible. I'm not sure if there's common factors that somehow support building data centers very close to each other, but I would guess there usually aren't.

Again, I'm not expert on this, but I try my best to make sense of things. So far this aligns fairly well with my knowledge and experience of things.