SAN FRANCISCO – Climate change is hitting us at an ever faster pace. 2022 is expected to be the sixth-hottest year on record as average temperatures reached 1.57 degrees Celsius above the 20th century average. We’re on track to normalize that temperature gain every year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted last year, and it could get worse if nothing is done.

As our world warms up, power outages and water shortages have ravaged many parts of the planet. Data centers may be among the first to feel the resource pinch. They need lots of energy to keep their servers powered, air conditioning and often water to cool the servers, sensors to monitor equipment, fire suppression and backup systems to absorb energy hiccups or software malfunctions — complex yet resilient data ecosystems.

That takes a lot of energy, leading data centers and data transmission networks to be responsible for around 1 percent of energy demand worldwide, according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency. Efficiency gains have kept that number steady for the last decade, but as climate change threatens energy availability, Big Tech has engaged more sustainable strategies. These include shifting more of their energy reliance to renewables like solar and wind, buying carbon credits to offset emissions, recycling more water and tinkering with other cooling options. The tech industry has also worked with governments in Sweden and Finland to place a handful of new data centers in cooler environments, where the ambient air can help keep things manageable.

But you can’t just store every data center near the Arctic Circle, since they need to be geographically close to users and business clients to reduce the time it takes to request and receive data, known as latency. That’s why the financial sector has continued to rent data center space in Manhattan, within a stone’s throw of the New York Stock Exchange for minimal lag between trades, and why Netflix has Amazon Web Services data center instances fired up around big cities so people don’t have to wait long to queue up the next episode of Stranger Things.

To read more, click on CNET