this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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Air and water move, especially when heated.
But un a radius of 6 mi? That sounds a bit high.
More close to a city with lots of concrete to store the heat.
Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that's equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.
Edit: and keep in mind, that's HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that's heating for over 600,000 people.
Even a large parking lot has a huge impact on how hot the surrounding area gets. But not 6+ miles away.
A large parking lot takes in heat from the sun and the releases it when the surrounding air becomes cooler. It heats the air, the air rises, new air comes in. A data centre produces heat all on its own, all the time, without ever stopping. It’s the difference between putting a cast iron pan in the sun and just straight up lighting a fire and keeping it burning day and night.
Read those numbers again. A quarter million homes worth of heat, so like 100 homes tall stacked into the same square footage? Or at least 10, I'm not checking my math.
Yeah, a much smaller heat source will produce a much smaller heat bubble. 100 MW is an amount of power that's difficult to comprehend. A home in the US consumes an average of ~11 MW in an entire year. Every single hour that a 100 MW data center operates, it consumes enough power for a little over 9 homes to run ALL YEAR. Every single day, enough power for almost 225 homes to run for a YEAR. The heat output of a data center is orders of magnitude higher than a parking lot.