Datacenters Feeling The Heat As Climate Risk Boils Over

Many of the world's top 100 datacenter hubs are at risk from rising global temperatures, as growing cooling requirements push up costs and water consumption, while shutdowns to prevent overheating during heat waves may become more frequent.

This timely research comes from consultants Maplecroft, which specialize in analyzing risks affecting global business and investors, just as large parts of Europe continue to endure record-breaking heatwaves, although its conclusions largely refer to the end of this decade and later.

The firm notes that datacenters are designed with resilience measures such as backup generators to cover gaps in power supply, and that both water and energy efficiency are generally improving.

But its analysis leads it to believe that the resilience of many bit barns could be stretched to breaking point when temperatures spike and demand for AI services, data storage, and cloud computing is also high.

Maplecroft says that 56 percent of the 100 top hubs for bit barns already rate as a "high" or "very high" risk for cooling degree days – an index the biz has created to measure how much and how often temperatures are likely to exceed the threshold triggering cooling requirements for buildings.

In a scenario assuming high greenhouse gas emissions, this is forecast to increase to 68 percent by 2040, and 80 percent by 2080, it says. However, the scenario it refers to (SSP585) does appear to be a worst-case model, representing the upper boundary of the range of scenarios produced by the international Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, Phase 6 (CMIP6).

The upshot is that three-quarters of the world's datacenter hub locations will see significant and increasing cooling demands for greater periods each year, resulting in higher water usage and energy costs. The 100 top bit barn locations will on average see an 83 percent increase in days where cooling will be necessary between 2030 and 2080.

Maplecroft notes that bit barn energy demands are already becoming a problem in some regions of the world, and it claims that over half of the top datacenter hubs are already located in water-stressed areas.

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An average mid-size bit barn facility uses about 300,000 gallons (1.4 million liters) of water a day, the research estimates, and this requirement is likely to increase as temperatures rise.

It forecasts that 52 percent of datacenter hubs will be in areas facing high or very high water stress by 2030, and says that water scarcity is likely to become a resilience and sustainability risk for the corporate customers relying on the IT and cloud services hosted in these facilities.

Bit barns already account for about 1.5 percent of global electricity demand, according to the International Energy Agency, but by 2030 this is expected to reach 3 percent. Cooling currently accounts for up to 40 percent of that, Maplecroft estimates, but this will inevitably increase as temperatures rise.

Overall, the changing climate will increasingly impact aging power grids and datacenters even in currently "low" risk markets in the future, the firm concludes.

Anticipating where these risks will emerge is a strategic concern for all global organizations that operate or use these services, it says.

"Datacenters now form the digital backbone of business," said Maplecroft Senior Asia Analyst Laura Schwartz.

"In an always-on, globally integrated economy, understanding the entire range of risks that can impact their resilience is a board-level imperative that needs mapping out today and into the future." ®