Climate Change Threatens the Profitability of Data Centers That Power AI

As governments, hedge funds, and tech giants pour billions of dollars into new data centers, one threat is quietly growing beneath their foundations: climate change. A report prepared by the climate risk analysis consultancy XDI warns that a significant part of these facilities are being planned in areas that are particularly vulnerable to floods, extreme heat and other climatic phenomena that could compromise their operability, insurability and even future profitability.

Artificial intelligence has become the engine of a new wave of global investment. The development of increasingly powerful models requires enormous processing and storage capacities, which has triggered a veritable boom in data center construction around the world. But according to an analysis by XDI, an organization specializing in physical climate risk that has examined more than 2,500 planned data centers around the world, part of this expansion could be ignoring factors that will be decisive for the viability of these infrastructures in the coming decades.

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