Key Points:
- A global study of 2,595 proposed data centers by XDI reveals that 6% are classed as high-risk under low-resilience building settings.
- North America accounts for nearly half of the world’s high-risk planned facilities, with 69 highly exposed sites located in the U.S.
- Extreme heat emerges as a major operational challenge, heavily threatening planned facilities in countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico.
- In Europe, France faces significant exposure, with 26% of its proposed data centers classified as high-risk under low-resilience conditions.
The global race to construct artificial intelligence infrastructure is colliding head-on with the physical realities of a changing climate. According to a newly released global analysis, a significant portion of proposed data center facilities worldwide face severe physical climate risks before construction even begins. The study, conducted by climate risk experts at the Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI), analyzed 2,595 planned data centers globally to identify hotspots exposed to extreme weather. The findings reveal that the rapid, multi-billion-dollar build-out of computing hubs is increasingly overlapping with regions highly vulnerable to coastal inundation, riverine flooding, and operational disruptions from extreme heat.
Out of the 2,595 proposed data centers evaluated in the study, 154 facilities—representing roughly 6% of the global sample—are officially classified as high-risk under low-resilience construction settings. This vulnerability is not distributed evenly across the globe, with developing economies in Asia bearing a disproportionate share of the risk. Southeast Asia has the highest concentration of highly exposed facilities, with 20% of its planned sites rated as high-risk. East Asia and South Asia follow closely, with 13% and 12% of their proposed facilities falling into the high-risk category, respectively. Under current climate models, these regional risks are projected to triple or more by the end of the century.
Surprisingly, North America accounts for nearly half of the high-risk planned data centers identified globally. The study located 69 of these highly vulnerable proposed facilities in the United States, highlighting a massive gap in how developers evaluate environmental risks. Within the U.S., nine states have 20% or more of their proposed data center pipeline classified in the high-risk category. Emerging risk hotspots include Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, and New York. As tech companies rush to build massive, 300-megawatt-scale server clusters to power advanced AI models, they are increasingly choosing sites in regions where utility grids, water resources, and physical buildings face escalating climate stress.
Beyond direct structural damage from flooding or storms, extreme heat has emerged as a silent operational threat to computing uptime. High-performance processors generate intense thermal energy, requiring sophisticated cooling systems to prevent hardware failures. The XDI report warns that planned facilities in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia, and Spain face some of the most acute heat-disruption risks globally, with 75% or more of their assessed assets classified as high-risk. In these regions, rising atmospheric temperatures will drastically increase the energy and water needed for cooling, putting immense strain on local electricity grids and drinking water supplies during seasonal heatwaves.
The heat crisis is particularly visible in India, where the rapid digitisation of the economy has attracted more than $7 billion in foreign data center investments. The study evaluated 41 proposed Indian facilities and determined that 12% are high-risk properties. More concerningly, the average damage risk for these sites is projected to jump by 269% between now and the end of the century due to heat stress. Indian states like Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Karnataka ranked among the top ten states worldwide with the highest modeled operational disruption risk. These findings raise serious questions about the long-term insurability and operational continuity of computing hubs in the region.
Europe is also facing a steep increase in climate exposure, with France standing out due to both its rapid pace of tech investment and its projected vulnerability. In recent years, France has successfully positioned itself as a premier European hub, attracting billions in foreign data center commitments. Yet, the study reveals that 26% of the planned French facilities assessed are already classified as high-risk under low-resilience construction settings, falling slightly to 18% under high-resilience settings. Emerging risk hotspots like the Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Hauts-de-France regions are seeing a surge in planned projects despite facing projected increases in average damage risk of 289% by 2100.
The study emphasizes that evaluating a data center’s safety requires looking far beyond the physical walls of the server building. Unmanned computing hubs rely on a highly complex web of external infrastructure, including high-capacity electrical substations, long-haul fiber optic networks, water treatment plants, and transportation corridors. Extreme weather events like flooding or wildfires do not need to hit the server racks directly to shut down operations; damaging a nearby power substation or cutting a fiber optic line is enough to take a facility completely offline. This cross-dependency highlights why operators must evaluate regional grid resilience before breaking ground on new projects.
As the physical and resource footprint of these technology hubs expands, local communities are starting to push back. Many residents are growing increasingly concerned about the massive amounts of electricity and water these facilities consume, which can drive up household utility bills and threaten local water security during droughts. This public anxiety recently culminated in Monterey Park, California, where voters overwhelmingly approved a historic ballot measure to ban new data centers within the city. This marked the first time a U.S. city has enacted a citywide prohibition on data center development through a voter-approved initiative, signaling a major shift in how local communities view the tech boom.
To prevent these high-tech investments from becoming stranded assets, developers and policymakers must completely rethink how they plan and construct computing infrastructure. Industry experts recommend adopting advanced construction standards, utilizing liquid cooling and waste heat reuse systems, and retrofitting decommissioned fossil fuel power plants to take advantage of existing high-capacity electrical grids. Furthermore, technology companies must move away from a purely carbon-focused view of sustainability to evaluate the broader water, land, and local community impacts of their facilities. Until these physical and environmental risks are fully integrated into corporate planning, the rapid growth of the digital economy will remain on a collision course with a changing climate.
