“(Data centers) are responsible for running many of the services you use. If you have Gmail, your Gmail is stored somewhere. If you have Instagram photos, your Instagram photos are stored in a data center,” said Clifford Stein. director of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute, in an interview with CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday. A data center can have thousands of computers in one room, generating a significant amount of heat. These computers must be cooled to prevent malfunction — a task that becomes much more difficult during extreme temperatures, Stein says. “As the climate warms, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep data centers cool,” Stein said. “They’re constantly generating heat, and they’re generating it everywhere.” During the July heatwave in the UK, where temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, Google Cloud reported “cooling-related failures” in one of the buildings housing its London data centers. Oracle Cloud also blamed “unusually high temperatures” after cooling units failed at a data center in London, resulting in some outages. Some companies choose to build data centers in cooler environments to avoid overheating issues. Iceland’s Chamber of Commerce is encouraging tech companies to set up more data centers in the country, touting “almost free cooling all year round” thanks to its cool climate. In 2020, Microsoft even experimented with storing data centers under the sea off the coast of Scotland, saying that underwater data centers are “reliable, practical and use energy sustainably”. However, Stein says these solutions could also result in slower data speeds for users. “The problem is you also want your data center to be close to the users,” he said. “When you want to get your data, you want to get it fast. So if you put all the data centers in Iceland, it would be easier to cool them, but your data will come much slower.” Watch the full interview about the possibility of overheating data centers with Stein at the top of this article.
