Data centers are creating 'heat islands' on land around them - warming them by up to 16 degrees, researchers warn

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3. And this doesn't include the heating effect of burning fossil fuels to generate the copious amounts of electricity

that the data centers consume. Burning copious amounts of fossil fuels produces copious amounts of greenhouse gasses. Whose concentration in the atmosphere keeps increasing at increasing rates.

There's plenty of debate about what that amount of fossil-fuel fired generation is that can be ascribed to data centers. Some buy their electricity from wind, solar, and nuclear sources, but then the question is how much of that actually results in more wind, solar, and nuclear, and how much it simply results in less wind, solar, and nuclear (and thus more fossil-fueled) serving the rest of the electrical load.

So let's say a utility generates 80% of its electricity with fossil fuel, and 20% from wind.

A data center contracts with the utility for half that wind-generated electricity.

The utility still has the same amount of regular load to serve, and now must generate more from fossil fuel to make up for the wind-generated electricity that was serving the regular load but is now dedicated to the data center.

Until the utility builds more wind generation -- but that's wind generation that could have gone towards reducing the fossil-fueled part that's serving the regular load.