Have you ever noticed how your laptop becomes warm after running heavy software for some time? Now imagine thousands of such powerful computers running together day and night inside huge buildings. That is exactly what an AI data centre looks like, and these giant facilities are now creating a new problem -- they are heating up the land around them.

Artificial Intelligence systems like ChatGPT, image generators, and smart assistants need massive computing power to work. To handle this, big companies are building enormous data centres across the world. But these centres release so much heat that the temperature of nearby areas is going up by several degrees. Experts are now calling this effect "data centre heat islands."

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According to recent reports, this rising heat may already be affecting nearly 340 million people who live close to such facilities. And the situation is only going to get worse.

Real estate company JLL has estimated that the world's data centre capacity could double between 2025 and 2030, and AI alone will be responsible for almost half of this huge demand.

Andrea Marinoni, a researcher from the University of Cambridge, noticed that the electricity needed to run these data centres has been rising steadily and could grow explosively in coming years. So, his team decided to study the real impact of this on our environment.

They examined satellite temperature data collected over the last 20 years and matched it with the locations of more than 8,400 AI data centres worldwide. To get accurate results, they mainly studied centres built far away from crowded cities, where other factors don't influence the temperature.

As reported by newscientist.com, a well-known UK-based online platform, the findings are truly worrying. The researchers discovered that once a data centre starts working, the surrounding land temperature goes up by an average of 2°C (3.6°F) within just a few months.

In some extreme cases, the rise was as high as 9.1°C (16.4°F) — almost like turning a pleasant area into a hot zone overnight.

What is even more shocking is that this heat does not stay near the data centre alone. It spreads. Researchers found that even at a distance of 10 kilometres, the temperature was higher than normal. At 7 kilometres away, the heat effect had reduced by only about 30 per cent. This means a huge stretch of land around each facility gets affected.

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"The results we found were quite shocking," said Marinoni. "If this trend continues, it could turn into a very serious problem in the future." For example, the Bajío region in Mexico and Aragon province in Spain both recorded a 2°C rise in temperature between 2004 and 2024, and researchers could not find any other clear reason behind it.

However, University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist said the matter may not be that simple. He explained that more research is needed to understand how much heat comes from the powerful computers inside and how much comes from the buildings themselves, which may also warm up due to direct sunlight falling on them.

Still, Marinoni made one thing very clear -- no matter what the exact cause is, data centres are definitely raising ground temperatures. He warned that planners, designers, and builders must be extremely careful while setting up new data centres in the future, otherwise the technology meant to make our lives easier may end up making our planet hotter.