Data centers in Phoenix are quietly turning up the thermostat on the neighborhoods around them.
A study published in the ASME journal Sustainable Buildings measured the waste heat that data centers release through their cooling systems, then examined what that heat does to nearby urban temperatures. The researchers found that areas near data center facilities in Phoenix ran up to 4 degrees warmer than surrounding parts of the city. The paper frames this as an emerging contributor to urban heat islands, alongside more familiar culprits like asphalt and traffic. Phoenix, with its dense and growing data center footprint, served as the case study.
That matters because Phoenix is already one of the hottest major cities in the country, and its data center buildout is only accelerating as companies rent capacity for AI training and inference. A few extra degrees sounds small until you realize it stacks on top of a heat wave, not instead of one, and it falls hardest on whoever lives closest to the server halls.
The industry has spent years optimizing efficiency scores and pointing to renewable energy contracts. Measuring what a data center does to the block next door is a newer, considerably less flattering metric.