Data Centers Are Facing a Climate Crisis
When the record temperature covering the UK by the end of July, Google Cloud data centers in London is offline for one day, due to cooling failure. The impact isn’t limited to customers who are near the hub: It’s location-specific service customers in the US and Pacific region, with the outage limiting their access into key Google services for hours. Oracle’s cloud-based data center in the capital was also affected by the heat, causing blackout for US customers. Oracle blamed “out-of-season heat” for the outage.
The UK Met Office, the weather watchdog, suggests that record heat is a driving factor to the impending, meaning data centers need to prepare for a new normal. .
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says there is a 93 percent chance that the year between now and 2026 will be the hottest year on record. It wasn’t a one time either. “As long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary General. “And with that, our oceans will continue to get warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea levels will continue to rise, and our weather will continue to grow. will become harsher.”
That change in weather will have an impact on all man-made infrastructure — including the data centers that hold our planet’s common knowledge online.
The question is whether they are prepared. “In my view, there is a problem with the existing data center warehouse being built,” said Simon Harris, head of critical infrastructure at data center consulting firm Business Critical Solutions. in the UK and Europe. But it doesn’t stop there. Forty-five percent U.S. data centers experienced an extreme weather event that threatened their ability to function, according to a survey by the Uptime Institute, a digital services standards body.
The data center cooling system is built using a complex, multi-stage process, said Sophia Flucker, director of UK data center consulting firm Operational Intelligence. This may include analyzing temperature data from a weather station close to the point where the data center will be built.
Problem? That data is historical and represents a time when temperatures in the UK did not reach 40 degrees Celsius. Harris said: “We are at the edge of a changing climate.
Jon Healy, UK data center consulting firm Keysource, said: “Not long ago, we designed a cooling system for a peak outdoor temperature of 32 degrees. “They’re 8 degrees taller than they were designed to be.” Design conditions are increasingly advanced — but the data center companies and the customers they work with operate as profit-driven businesses. Data from consulting firm Turner & Townsend shows data center construction costs has grown in almost every market in recent years, and construction companies are advised to reduce costs.
“If we go from 32 degrees down to 42 degrees, great,” Healy said. “You’re having to make things significantly larger to support a very small percentage of the year” as temperatures rise. “It has to be done with caution.”