Исследование First Street: 80% дата-центров уязвимы перед наводнениями, пожарами и ураганами

Almost 80% of the world's data centers are located in zones of extreme climate threats — floods, hurricanes, and wildfires. Such is the conclusion drawn by First Street, a company specializing in climate risk analysis.

Scale of Vulnerability

First Street analysts assessed digital infrastructure facilities worldwide and discovered an alarming picture: the vast majority of data centers are located in zones that are already threatened by extreme natural phenomena today. Each region carries its own risks:

• Floods — relevant for facilities in coastal lowlands, river floodplains, and urban agglomerations with overburdened storm water systems
• Extreme winds and hurricanes — threaten data centers in the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane belts, as well as in Asia's monsoon zones
• Wildfires and steppe fires — critical for facilities in the western USA, southern Europe, and Australia

Climate incidents result in concrete losses for operators: unplanned downtime, damage to server equipment, costly repairs, and sharp increases in insurance premiums. Corporate clients renting capacity from cloud providers risk losing access to critical services and incurring penalties for breaching their own obligations to users.

AI Infrastructure Paradox

There is bitter irony in this situation. Data centers powering artificial intelligence systems are among the world's largest consumers of electrical energy. The AI boom of recent years has dramatically accelerated the construction of new facilities and increased their total consumption — and thus greenhouse gas emissions.

Those same emissions drive the climate crisis: making rainfall more intense, hurricanes more powerful, and fire-dangerous seasons longer. As a result, AI infrastructure falls into a feedback loop: it harms the climate through its own emissions and simultaneously becomes an increasingly vulnerable victim of climate disasters. For the industry, this is not an abstract threat.

Natural cataclysms have repeatedly affected major digital infrastructure facilities — from typhoons in the Asia-Pacific region to hurricanes on the eastern coast of the USA and devastating fires in California.

Financial and Operational Consequences

The climate vulnerability of data centers translates into direct financial losses. Downtime costs operators extremely dearly: even a few hours of outage at a large facility means multi-million-dollar losses — both direct and through penalties to corporate clients whose services depend on infrastructure stability. Insurance companies are already reconsidering their approaches.

Rates for facilities in high-risk zones are rising faster than the market, and some underwriters are refusing to insure data centers in the most dangerous locations — especially those located in river floodplains or fire-prone forest areas. Adaptation measures require serious capital investments: strengthening building structures, independent backup power systems, construction of duplicate capacity in geographically dispersed regions. All these expenses ultimately are factored into the cost of cloud services and gradually are felt by corporate clients.

What This Means

The AI boom has created colossal demand for data centers — often in regions where land is cheaper and permits are easier to obtain, but climate risks are higher. Now the industry must rethink the logic of placing new facilities and urgently increase the resilience of those already operating. For cloud providers and their clients, the question of infrastructure reliability in the context of changing climate has become operational — not theoretical — today.