Eighty percent of data centers sit in places that flood, burn, or cook them alive. The study didn't specify which geniuses chose to build billion-dollar server farms in floodplains and fire zones, but rest assured those people got promoted.
Climate risk analysts now confirm what a fourth grader with a map could have told you for free. Put your temperature-sensitive equipment in a place that gets really hot or really wet, and bad things happen. Revolutionary stuff.
The acute risks include flooding and wildfires. The chronic risks include extreme heat, which is apparently different from regular heat in that it costs more to air-condition. Data centers require cooling systems that work every single day, so building them in regions where the temperature climbs past survivable levels seems like a solid business plan.
This matters because your pornography and cat videos need to live somewhere. When the servers drown or melt, you'll have to entertain yourself the old-fashioned way. Good luck with that.
The report doesn't mention whether anyone considered not building critical infrastructure in places named things like Flood Creek Valley or Hell's Oven Township. That would require reading a weather report before breaking ground, which apparently violates some unwritten rule of modern construction.
Tech companies spent the last decade assuring everyone that artificial intelligence would solve climate change. Now it turns out the buildings running the AI can't survive the climate. Irony died of heatstroke in a poorly located data center.
Retail traders who bought cloud computing stocks because a TikTok told them to are now learning that "the cloud" is actually a warehouse in Arizona that floods every monsoon season.
The solution is obvious: build new data centers in places that don't kill them. But that costs money and requires admitting the first decision was stupid, so expect five more studies and zero action.
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