The claim

Data centers will heat up the land and water around them

“According to that professor, I think it's Utah State, it's going to rise the heat of the land around it and the water, and that's going to affect wildlife, the environment, and people.”

Seen: Public comment at the 18 August 2026 budget hearing, asking the council to stop approving data centers. First seen August 18, 2026.

Our finding Accurate, but incomplete

True as far as it goes, and it leaves out something that changes the picture.

Data centers do warm the air next to them: the one direct measurement found about 1.5°F on average, up to 4°F, reaching about a third of a mile. The Utah State professor's much larger figures were for a 9-gigawatt project in Box Elder County, not Eagle Mountain, and no one has measured anything here.

The numbers

Measured downwind, Phoenixaverage; up to 4°F, about a third of a mile out+1.3 to 1.6°F

Davies estimate, Hansel Valleyat night, for a 9 GW project in Box Elder Countyup to +28°F

Measured in Eagle Mountainno published reading near any campusNone

What’s true

The physics is sound. Nearly all the electricity a data center uses leaves it as heat, and the first study to measure it directly found it. Arizona State University researchers drove temperature sensors upwind and downwind of four Phoenix-area data centers, from 36 to 169 megawatts, in summer and autumn 2025. Downwind air averaged 1.3 to 1.6°F warmer than upwind air and reached 4°F warmer, and the effect could be detected about a third of a mile out. The study is peer-reviewed.

What it leaves out

The professor is Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University, and his warning was about somewhere else. He was describing the Stratos project in Hansel Valley, Box Elder County: a planned 9 gigawatts with its own gas power plant in the same valley. The Salt Lake Tribune reported his back-of-the-envelope estimate of five degrees Fahrenheit warmer by day and up to 28 at night there. He has not published a figure for Eagle Mountain, and nothing in the record shows any data center warming water here.

More detail

The figure most often shared, a 2°C (3.6°F) average rise around data centers worldwide, comes from a Cambridge-led study of satellite readings. It measures the temperature of the ground surface, not the air, and it has not been peer-reviewed. Critics, including the Uptime Institute, say concrete roofs and parking lots on what used to be fields would warm the surface that much on their own, without the servers.

How a campus is cooled changes how the heat gets out. Meta's existing Eagle Mountain buildings cool with evaporated water, which carries much of the heat away as vapor; its new buildings will use dry cooling, closer to the Phoenix sites that were measured. QTS says its campus is not water-cooled. No temperature measurement near any Eagle Mountain campus has been published, and no council member or city staff member has raised the question in a meeting transcript this site holds.

Where this comes from

Every finding here is drawn from an open-meeting recording or a published document. Check it yourself.

“According to that professor, I think it's Utah State, the heat— it's going to rise the heat of the land around it and the water, and that's going to affect wildlife, the environment, and people.”

A resident, in public commentThe meeting, August 18, 2026 Read the transcript

“The professor predicts dumping that much heat and energy into Hansel Valley will raise local temperatures by five degrees Fahrenheit during the day and up to 28 degrees at night.”

The Salt Lake Tribune, on Robert Davies of Utah State University, May 7, 2026Utah's data center could create a massive heat island (Salt Lake Tribune)

Arizona State University, the Phoenix measurements, May 18, 2026Sailor, Samareh Abolhassani and Martin, published in the ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities. Downwind air averaged 1.3 to 1.6°F warmer than upwind, up to 4°F, detectable about a third of a mile away.Data center waste heat as an emerging urban thermal hazard (ASME)

The satellite study (preprint), March 21, 2026Marinoni et al., University of Cambridge: land surface temperature up 2°C on average after a data center opens. Not peer-reviewed.The data heat island effect (arXiv 2603.20897)

Uptime Institute, critiquing the satellite study, August 20, 2026Argues that the roofs and parking lots of a data center alone can account for the reported rise, without waste heat.Data centers face new scrutiny over heat island effect

More checks on data centers

See all 22 fact checks →

Checked October 6, 2026. Nothing goes on the fact-check list unless an open-meeting recording or a published document can settle it: the rules. Spot a mistake? civicrollcall@gmail.com