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Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

Research suggests the price of treating illnesses related to building of computing infrastructure in the US is on the rise

Air pollution derived from the huge amounts of energy needed to run data centres has been linked to treating cancers, asthma and other related issues, according to research from UC Riverside and Caltech. “Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,” said Shaolei Ren, associate professor at UC Riverside. Ren said there was an opportunity for tech groups to reverse the trend of a “growing public health threat” by strategically placing their data centres in less populated locations to have less impact.

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