Luckily, modern cooling techniques like heat pumps are much more efficient than resistive heating, 300% to 500% efficiency is easily attainable. You can keep the inside of a data center nice and chilly at room temperature even in the middle of a heat wave.

Then there is also the heat island effect. Concrete boxes will heat up an area more than dirt or wood, even if those boxes are completely empty inside. If you build them near where people live, people are gonna notice. Houses have gardens, industrial complexes such as data centers and factories don't.

Also, the effect is more concentrated downwind, so the heat effect is not some kind of uniform distribution in all directions.

where there is a demand for results, academia will meet the supply

I’m confused. Rejecting one GW of heat to the building exterior with heat exchangers is going to heat up the area around the heat exchangers.

If you had a hypothetical 1 GW generator and used a hypothetical 1 GW loadbank with 1 GW of resistive heating and a fan that was outdoors, the air temperature would rise.

That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?