A new study published in Environmental Research Letters has found little evidence that hyperscale data centers cause significant heating of surrounding land. While a previous study suggested data centers heat surrounding land by about 2 °C on average (up to 9 °C), reaching 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away, 13 years of satellite data reveal that server waste heat causes minimal nighttime surface warming, while building materials actually cool ground temperatures during the day.
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I already see one flaw with this paper that they sort of try to address but really seems to me like it makes the entire thing useless. The 12 data centers they list are not new AI focused Hyperscaler Data Centers from what it looks like. Yes the inzai ones call themselves hyperscaler but there’s basically zero definitions anywhere of what that means.
The 12 they listed combined have a power scale less than the new AI hyperscaler data centers people are talking about and those data centers are distributed across two decently large regions of Japan and 9 of them (best I can tell) seem to be old school cloud hosting data centers, so different cooling scheme and impact.
Extrapolating from these completely different designs to the new AI hyperscalers seems flawed and not fully addressed here.
Trying to compare distributed small heat sources to one massive concentrated one is kind of ignoring major systemic differences right from the get go.