Comment by jeffbee

Yes. And just on the arithmetic it should be crystal clear that no data center is anywhere near energetic enough to heat the countryside for miles around. The effect comes from the man-made surfaces facing the sun instead of natural ground cover. Only the sun has the energy to do this.

I used the paper's data to investigate some of their claims. The top figure shows the temperature in the area surrounding Google's Oklahoma data center, in the middle of the figure. I think you can clearly see that the effect is totally dominated by the nearby coal power station and its huge, black pile of slag.

https://observablehq.com/@jwb/data-center-temperature-effect...

The scene is roughly here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.2154925,-95.3281217,13968m/d...

Edit: fixed notebook access. Sorry.