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.

Well then why not break them up into smaller fringe data centers and spread them out to reduce cooling needs? Wouldn't that also make them quieter?

It's probably not as cost-efficient, so they won't do that. Also, more data centers but smaller ones probably means more land area overall, which means more nature destroyed, so... pick your poison, I guess?

Yeah, as already pointed out, dissipating all that heat in space is a major obstacle.

I think there's much more sense putting them in the sea, like MS experiment with Project Natick.

This is taken from the source listed in the article's cooling section. I will say that trying to run these chips at anything above ~70-75 C continously is pretty uneconomical for total lifespan and will start to see chip failure within the 5 year operating window. Second, a 5 year lifespan is far too short to be economical (personal opinion explained below), and far too long for the advancement of such chips (most are outdated in the space of 2-3 years).

The ISS (largest thing in space) has a surface area of ~2,500 square meters. That would get you about 1.75 MW of dissipation. Now the cost of putting something into space has decreased quite a lot thanks to SpaceX (~1/10 of the historical). If we were to apply this we would get ~17.5 MW, and if we are being super gernous and say a further 90% of the tonnage of the ISS is purely for human habitation and expirementation, you could get 175 MW. This would cost ~150 Billion dollars applying the ISS budget.

Per congress there's about 176TWh used annually by data centers in the US at current levels. 175 MW would equate to about 1.53 TWh (Straight past GWh, whihc I was surprised by). The discrepancy is more than a hundred times, meaning you'd need an utterly ludicrous investment. Even if you were to entertain that you could cut off 99% of the tonnage of the ISS for just the cooling array, it is simply an insane amount of money to get current levels.

Note: I just realized that I accidently did not actually adjust square meters to 70C and used the assumption of 1 square meter per 700 Watts which is 85 C fresh launch, not even the end of life condition! I just don't feel like redoing the math lol. This would make the number ~1.5 times higher.

As someone who got a B.S. in Physics and works in Electrical Engineering, I see way too many challenges in the project for it to be completed in any reasonable amount of time (before 2035) with any reasonable budget (under $100 billion for 1 TWh). 

Won't that heat the ocean?

It would, right around data center's exhausts - but for 1 cubic km of static water to be heated additional 1 degree Celsius in a day you would apparently need ~50GW output, which is 50x of what currently largest data center is capable of consuming. And sea is not static water, so it gets spread out quickly. China has already started doing this.

Or you can build them under residential areas and use excess heat for heating (Finland is doing this).

Underground and underwater don't sound as bad, as long as those methods doesn't hurt wildlife.

Will we also let everything burn up upon re‑entry into the atmosphere when the chips have to be replaced? Like Starlink just does with 1-2 satellites a day to destroy earths resources forever and also the ozone layer with all that aluminum oxide?

Fair point. Sadly Elon wasn't on one of those satellites at the time.