A decade ago, I worked at a facility which owned 1,000,000 sqft of datafloor space. My location was "only" 300,000 sqft, their largest single location.

During my tenure there, we went from continuous ~2MW to ~3.5MW (5MW designmax). Certain days of the year we would spend hours just shedding load with our on-site 1MW loadsink/"toaster", being paid by PowerCo to burn off their excess baseload. This cut our energy bill in half (despite using even more energy!). Hopefully battery grid storage has reduced this practice..?

On those days our entire cooling yard would exceed 130°F (asphalt surface, primarily). Semi-arid Texas, otherwise, at a balmy 102°F.

"Seven kilometres away, there was only a 30 per cent reduction in the intensity." That seems extremely surprising, being able to raise the current temperature by several degrees over kilometers, are datacenters put in regions with no wind at all? And hot air is supposed to escape by itself.

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