Climate crisis takes a toll on data centers

Data centers need to prepare for a new normal, as the World Meteorological Organization says there’s a 93% chance that one year between now and 2026 will be the hottest on record and temperatures will continue to rise.

In late July, record temperatures in the U.K. forced Google Cloud’s data centers in London to go offline for a day due to cooling failures, affecting customers in the U.S. and Pacific regions. The same was true for Oracle’s U.K. data center, also affecting U.S. customers.

The weather shift will have an impact on all human-made infrastructure. Uptime Institute, a digital services standards agency, noted 45% of U.S. data centers have experienced an extreme weather event that threatened their ability to operate.

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