Hot news roundup: El Niño’s record heat and other hot topics

For PropertyGuru’s news roundup, things heat up with El Niño bringing record heat in 2024, seven strategies for tropical house designs, and the need for new designs for data centers due to the heat generated by AI.

El Niño forecast to drive record heat from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024

The current climate event known as El Niño is likely to supercharge global heating and deliver record-breaking temperatures from the Amazon to Alaska in 2024, analysis has found.

Coastal areas of India by the Bay of Bengal and by the South China Sea, as well as the Philippines and the Caribbean, are also likely to experience unprecedented heat in the period to June, after which El Niño may weaken, scientists said in The Guardian.

The new analysis uses computer models to identify the likely regional hotspots in the first half of 2024. It also found a 90 percent chance that the global temperature over that period would set a new record.

7 Strategies for designing a house in the tropics

Designing a house in the tropics should always try to consider and respond to its region’s climate. This design approach is becoming increasingly relevant as climate change is projecting warmer temperatures in the future. As a result, designing a house to be more responsive to the tropics and its climate is essential.

When designing and building a home in a tropical climate, there are vital principles that you should consider. These include orientation, solar shading, and passive ventilation, strategies associated with tropical architecture. Architropics enumerates these seven strategies when designing a house in the tropics.

Artificial Intelligence pushes creation of new data center designs

Architects who design data centers are grappling with one of the biggest challenges their field has seen: How to create buildings that can handle the intense power and cooling demands of artificial intelligence.

These warehouse-sized properties house rows upon rows of computer servers and other equipment, machines that serve as the backbone of the internet by processing vast amounts of data — think tens of thousands of movies streaming simultaneously — and generating excessive heat in the process.

Now artificial intelligence, or AI, is requiring data centers on steroids to process the growing amount of data being generated. Just like e-commerce drove unprecedented demand for industrial warehouses, AI development is expected to more than double the need for global data center storage capacity by 2027, according to JLL’s Data Centers 2024 Global Outlook in CoStar.

The Property Report editors wrote this article. For more information, email: [email protected].