Your noise statement is one datapoint, there are others in the article. Who's right regarding the noise?

How's the power bill?

Much better than living next to a chemical plant. I thought the article and video were grasping at straws to find negative impacts. There’s no pollution on site so they have to talk about sounds that can’t be heard on the video and electrical poles.

I think this is dangerously close to NIMBY territory. People who bought homes in the cheapest land possible in areas with ample available farmland are upset that someone else bought some other land.

It’s quite easy to avoid that if you aren’t just buying on pure dollars per square foot like so many suburban buyers seem to be doing.

When it comes to vibrant urban core you actually benefit by having a lot of different things nearby “in my backyard.” As an added bonus, businesses looking for cheap land for factories and data centers tend to stay away.

But if we live in the city we’ll be “on top of each other” and I won’t have a walk-in closet to store all my clothes I don’t wear, and I won’t have a garage to store the car that I’m required to own to get around because nothing is nearby me, and I need a shed for my lawn mower because I can’t just share with my neighbors and I need my own yard because the public park is too far away, etc etc.

And very few people work there relative to the impact. Sure nobody liked living near factories in ye olden days, but they did like the employment opportunities.

You can see how few work there when you compare the size of the data centre and the size of the car park.

I wonder how much property value is affected.

Did you read the article? It's about Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the US. The people "affected" both are the ones making the decision about where to put the data centers and the ones profiting off them. Don't lose sleep.

Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave. This isn't mountaintop removal in coal country. This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.

The fact that there's even an article about it is evidence of the fact that the affected are wealthy. The article is their voice. The wealth that allows them to live in Loudoun County is their voice.

If you like the Onion, check out the Babylon Bee.

I live close to a hospital and they make a generator test run once a month. That's an ultra deep sinus (~30Hz) that's humming along - you can hear it everywhere within the city.

It's was super easy to measure using a Sensirion Differential Pressure sensor. They have a few extremely sensitive models that have a 100Hz sampling rate (50Hz useable after Nyquist) - also: you can sense washing machines (from vibrating buildings) with it 2 blocks away.

Due to rising power densities, and constrained power and costs of that power, modern data centers tend to use free air cooling vs the older always compressor cooling. When the temperatures are right they basically just use fans to bring outside air in, which is much much louder because you have to move a lot of it.

It goes way beyond normal building HVAC levels, AI has pushed many DC's from 8 kW to 17 kW a rack in just a few years.

IIRC the average medium office building pulls about 22 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square foot of floorspace per year. So their cooling needs are tiny.

I worked in a medium data center and there was no noise outside, no noise from the office in the same building, no noise outside the airlock, very loud inside. Maybe huge datacenters are very different somehow?

Scale; comparing DC cooling to a large building's is like comparing street noise in a suburb to a highway.

It'd be nice to have some hard data on it though. Sometimes the hum is "god damn, that is annoying!" and other times it's someone saying "20 miles that way they built a DC and now it makes the cell phone tower effects twice as bad in this area" when reality was it doesn't show up as audible a half mile away.

I once visited a fairly large DC in the outskirts of paris (Scaleway DC5) and it was basically dead silent outside. I guess these large DCs are just build with absolutely no concern for noise pollution?

I have never visited datacenters that large, but transformer substations can have an audible hum to them. Tests of diesel generators can also produce a bit of noise.

I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws that prevents datacenters from being built where people live. When we built a fairly small datacenter we had to place it in an industrial area with no housing and no offices.

If got past the first sentence, you might learn the answer to the question. Substations and power/peaker plants. Maybe not in all cases, but I wouldn't want to live next a building have has row upon row of AC systems running 24 hours a day.

You can look on youtube for any number of videos showing you what it sounds like to be near one of these centers.

For example,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHPKPmoW910

> Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right?

There's going to be variation based on how the data center is constructed.

The ones I've seen (which is certainly not all of them, so take it with a grain of salt) in the geographic area that this particular article is about are closed buildings that should be pretty well noise regulated individually, but that's not always the case -- some companies (like Marathon/MARA) have data centers using what are effectively open air designs that don't contain sound very well at all and can easily generate significant noise pollution around them.

And some companies (eg. xAI/grok) are a bit of a hybrid where the main part of the data center is enclosed but they park many loud methane turbines outside of the building for power and those make a lot of noise (and air pollutants).

The basic TL;DR is that it is possible to build data centers that aren't an absolute nuisance to the population around them, but there are plenty of data centers out there that don't meet that goal. And the more these companies try to scale up quickly to meet their perceived "AI" needs, the worse things are getting in terms of noise pollution, air pollution and competing for resources (like water and energy) with local residents, etc.

Nobody in this article is whining about a company "building something". But whenever anything this large is built, there are externalities. Externalities are an indirect cost or benefit to others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

It just seems to me that in Virginia in the United States, the externalities of building a massive data centre in an existing residential zone are either not being considered or not being acted upon.

I'd hate it if a company built a massive data centre right next to where I sleep. Low noise pollution is vitally important to quality of life.

I'd like to live in a society that treated me fairly, and at least purchased my property off me before building the data centre.

By all means, build the infrastructure. But please look after your people. It's not that arduous to purchase a few properties in exchange for a massive amount of profit.

It is a human interest story so it focused on that angle. I think most people can recognise that having these data centres on US soil outweighs the quality of life concerns of the local residents. NIMBYism holds back a lot of infrastructure in the UK, that does get discussed a lot here.