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Destroying a Community with a Gigantic "Clogged Vacuum Cleaner"
- walrus01 2mo agoanother link: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-noise-pollution-dowagiac-michigan-blasts-homes https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-noi... This particular datacenter was retrofitted into an existing industrial building, there was some sort of industrial metalworking factory there previously. Structure dates to 1972. The houses are basically right across the street from it. The noise does sound annoying as hell. This seems like a basic failure in local permitting/zoning to allow something this noisy without a significant empty buffer zone to any residences. edit: it's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dowagiac,+MI+49047,+USA/@41.9924536,-86.0992949,740m https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dowagiac,+MI+49047,+USA/@4...
- NAR8789 2mo agowait, what was the sound from the industrial metalworking factory like?
- cyberax 2mo agoIt was likely quieter on average and likely not working during the night. BTW, I grew up a few blocks away from a steel foundry, and it typically was emitting a low humming noise. It faded into the background and was not a problem. We could hear loud clangs from time to time, but not at night.
- Rebelgecko 2mo agoPresumably much less- the datacenter was apparently not that disruptive until they tore down the trees between it and the homes. The manufacturing facility may not have been 24/7 either
- ckozlowski 2mo agoIt likely didn't have the power requirements either. I'm just guessing here, but that sounds a lot like turbine whine. (I've heard them elsewhere, not to mention been around plenty of aircraft) My guess is that they brought one on site like they've done to other facilities to provide on-site power where the local grid isn't sufficient. The pledge by their CEO to shut down crypto-mining equiptment feels like a deflection to me, because I don't think that's the source of the noise. It's the turbine generator, and switching to AI I don't think will change the power requirements any. We'll see I suppose.
- cortesoft 2mo agoIf you watch the video, there used to be a line of trees that helped block the sound. Then those trees were ripped out to build a loading dock, and the building was converted to crypto miners.
- burningChrome 2mo agoI don't even know what to say to this because they never decided to replant the tress or create some other kind of buffer in its place. Just yanked the trees out and moved on. I'm not even an environmentalist, but this sort of nonsense really pisses me off.
- guessmyname 2mo agoMake John Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer of Hyperscale Data, live in one of those houses for a month. See how he likes the sound.
- margalabargala 2mo agoTo be fair a large amount of the fault here lies with the city, who permitted a data center to be built in a residential neighborhood. There are plenty of dirty, noisy, disruptive industrial buildings out there. Smelters, quarries, incinerators, etc. Fine to build them. Don't build them next to houses, build them next to each other.
- K0balt 2mo agoWhat it really comes down to is a political and legal environment that allows or even encourages grift at an industrial scale and has largely erased public accountability by turning everything into a divided political issue (and proletariat politics into a sort of “sports team” identity) It’s genius in a malevolent way, and absolutely nullifies the democratic process in favor of corporate oligarchy.
- ChiperSoft 2mo agoIf they're any thing like my city, the board members don't live anywhere near the areas they're granting permits for.
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo agoCan someone explain why the new crop of datacenters are considered to be noisy?. I've been around the Wall Street datacenters in Jersey and they are basically the same as nondescript office buildings surrounded by a fence. The ones running on generators 24/7 are a problem but what is making the rest such an issue?
- ckozlowski 2mo agoI wrote this in another reply here, but from this article and others I've read on Space X's/Tesla's datacenters, it's the use of turbine generators that cause that enormous whine sound. (Note how similar it is to a jet engine.) I live in Ashburn, where we have datacenters all over the place. But none of them sound like this. At worst, we get a dull hum, much lower in volume, if the air handlers are working especially hard. But you need to be on top of them to hear that. Ashburn has the infrastructure however. From what I'm reading, other places don't. So they bring in power on-site, and it seems to be much less regulated.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoUsually I think they're trying to get the infrastructure, but because we've created a permitting nightmare across the US, they can't get the permits for anything they want, so they're stuck with mobile generation that doesn't require much permitting. Edit: I don't think it SHOULD be this way, but downvoting me doesn't change that, only organizing for changes does.
- mrtesthah 2mo agoUsing unpermitted turbine generators[1] is just as illegal as violating the other permits they’d need to obtain for grid access. Doing illegal acts is a choice on their part — no one is forcing them to do that. There is no inherent right to private profit at the expense of the social good. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk-xai-datacenter-memphis https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
- dijksterhuis 2mo agoyoutube video link from the article behind the "you must agree to cookies to play this youtube video embed that's actually not a youtube video embed" shenanigans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474
- luk212 2mo agoThis feels less like a data center problem and more like a basic failure to price and regulate industrial externalities...are crypto mining or ai compute socially useful? Up for debate, but what isn't is that neither should make a surrounding neighborhood unlivable. Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound. Any facility like this should have to prove it can operate within a certain acousting footprint before it's built
- ares623 2mo agoAh, the ol' "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" defense It's so easy! Just think of every possible scenario and avenue that can be abused, and legislate it, in perpetuity.
- ImPostingOnHN 2mo ago> Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound Maybe the regulations could be structured around a scaled integral of volume over time
- cortesoft 2mo agoYou really just need the noise ordinance to have more teeth... instead of just a perpetual fine, you need to be able to shut them down if they continue to exceed the noise threshold.
- m463 2mo agoI think that's a weird problem with law in general. Corporations created by "incorporation", creating a "body" with all the rights of a human, are rarely treated with common sense punishments when they do wrong. Humans do bad things, and they are not only fined, but forfeit rights, are segregated from others, put in jail, and sometimes executed.
- margalabargala 2mo agoA fine is perfectly adequate to address the problem, provided you're able to enforce it. Each time a repeat offender offends, simply double the fine from their last offense. Repeat monthly until their insolvency, at which point you confiscate the building and sell it to someone willing to follow the law.
- soupspaces 2mo agoEvery day, the gap between the news and The Onion gets a little smaller.
- walrus01 2mo agoFrom 12 years ago https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375/ https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...
- metalman 2mo agowhat I want to know is why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere, catch all the heat and sell it to the few buildings with actual tenants, and as soon as the much less flamable sodium batteries come on at scale stack the rest of the empty buildings with those,and then run the whole mess from cheap solar
- Schiendelman 2mo agoIt's because you have a bunch of different unrelated "theys" in your one "they". There's no one person who can make a decision like that, and the risk and time inherent in trying to negotiate between all those parties is far, far worse than building new.
- protocolture 2mo ago>why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere Big problem is providing enough electricity to an office tower. A local company built a test T3 datacenter in an office building. Heaps of floorspace. But they cant get enough juice in, they started selling racks with less and less guaranteed supply. IIRC the site is basically forever capped at 2.5MW. Whats worse is that the inner city location makes it an absolute favorite with telcos, but the telcos cant put their towering monstrous electricity sucking routers in for fear of browning the site (We tried, we were politely asked to leave). I was walking past the construction of a new site just yesterday and they had the electrical switchboards on the pavement being prepped for being craned in through the open roof. Theres no way you would be able to easily retrofit for that sort of electrical supply.
- K0balt 2mo agoRoom temperature superconducting cables will be really nice, one day.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoAlso depends on what you were used to before. I live in a rural area and it can be annoying when a neighbor half a mile away is running a lawn mower. In a downtown urban center there is so much noise from traffic, emergency vehicles, construction, and equipment of various types that a new data center would probably just blend in unnoticed.
- K0balt 2mo agoThe problem is the salvaged aviation turbines. Airplanes are prevented from operating at high power levels above cities. These engines-from-old-airplanes are likely being operated in their high efficiency range, around 80 percent, so they are loud. Living next to a runway loud.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoAirplanes can't carry much in the way of sound supression or "mufflers" on engines. Running them on the ground, it should be straightforward to make them reasonably quiet.
- K0balt 2mo agoThe sheer volume of air moved by high pressure gas turbines makes that large and costly. Not impossible, but very large. These units are 2 per container size, intake and exhaust silencers would probably increase their footprint 5-8x. Not that it shouldn’t be done, just that there’s a lot of incentive not to do it.
- xnx 2mo agoAnd, surprisingly, dense urban buildings are pretty good at blocking sound. It's rare to hear a mower even one street over.
- Levitating 2mo agoThis reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas. [1]: https://youtu.be/m7_WDzPyoqU https://youtu.be/m7_WDzPyoqU
- ETH_start 2mo agoThese houses are directly across the street. It looks like the data center owner should have allotted some buffer land between the facility and the property line.
- zkmon 2mo agoSweet foods turn into poison after a limit of intake. Science and technology products turn against humanity when they are produced in excess of the need. The blind belief that technological advances are desirable without limits - should stop.
- uwagar 2mo agodont worry people of the first world, all the noise is going to move to the 3rd world in the next few years.
- uwagar 2mo agowell i dont know why the downvote, this is exactly what happens to most toxic processes. exported out to the 3rd world.
- bob1029 2mo agoThe most annoying part of this for me is that acoustic treatment is usually unbelievably effective if you make even the slightest attempt at applying it. A box lined with mineral wool is not exactly an expensive or complicated engineering solution. I see this kind of ignorance everywhere. Rooms where people suffer all day every day that could be made 10x more comfortable with $50 of treatment and literally 30 minutes of labor. Same thinking applies to these hyperscalars. There are some frequency ranges that are more difficult to control (infrasonic), but those are not typically found in a datacenter site.
- K0balt 2mo agoThe salvaged aviation turbines are the majority of the issue. Non turbine-powered data centers mostly are reasonably quiet.
- breakpointalpha 2mo agoAt a minimum the data center should be responsible for paying for noise mitigation on all houses within a half mile of the site. That work could be done within a few months, upgrade all the window treatments, replace all doors with solid core, add sound mitigation fencing, etc.
- bob1029 2mo agoThe problem with noise is that it follows inverse square law. It is several orders of magnitude more efficient to simply abate the noise at the source.
- bdavbdav 2mo agoAll that to mine crypto. What a waste of resources.