Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right? What would be the reason it would go beyond like any HVAC-ish thing on a large building? Lost me at the first sentence :(
Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right? What would be the reason it would go beyond like any HVAC-ish thing on a large building? Lost me at the first sentence :(
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.
What is the sensor attached to? And how can you pinpoint the source direction of sounds with it?
The product listing says something about a manifold, it looks like a raw component with 4 pins or so.
https://sensirion.com/products/catalog/SDP510
Sensirion SDP600-25Pa
SDP600-25Pa --- I2C ---> ESP32 --- UDP over Wifi --> Linux Host with simple Python recording script
Very rough pin-pointing is possible: plastic kitchen funnel which is attached to the sensor using a short hose.
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?
> I worked in a medium data center and there was no noise outside
AI datacenters have much larger cooling needs and often use generators
> generators
Ahem.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Why don't they use Tesla solar panels and batteries?
They don’t have room for another building the size of the data center to store batteries in and thousands of acres of land for solar panels (wild ass guesses on battery building footprint and solar field footprint)
Critical loads require generators, batteries don’t cut it. Data centers want the most reliable backup power they can with the longest runtime. Battery storage density is not high enough to back up a 500MW+ data center for any length of time without a comical amount of batteries.
When the NEC allows critical, equipment, and life safety branch at hospitals to be backed up with batteries and solar panels, battery storage will be at a point where battery backup of data centers is feasible. Right now it isn’t.
They have(in just this one example) - 35 turbines at 16MW each - that's half a gigawatt of power. Having the kind of battery storage that could provide this amount of power for more than a few minutes is.....well, not impossible, but extremely expensive, especially for something that will just sit there unused(hopefully). Gas generators are comparatively very cheap, easily available, and if fuel is being fed into the system can operate for days on end.
And you'd need an insane amount of solar panels to actually recharge those batteries in any kind of reasonable time too, so you expose yourself to a massive risk if you had two out of power events within say 12 hours. So you'd probably build all of those batteries and solar panels but you'd still need to have emergency generators ready to go anyway.
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.
> 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.
17 kW per rack for AI/ML HPC was workable >5 years ago. If you're not budgeting for double or triple that number nowadays you're not capacity planning properly.
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.
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
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.
There are zoning laws (barring anomalies like Houston). Datacenters are generally only built in areas zoned industrial. The problem is there’s often some type of residential construction on an adjacent residential-zoned parcel. The zoning usually doesn’t require any kind of buffer between the residential and industrially-zoned area.
> I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws
If that's surprising, you should look into how infamous the city of Houston's lack of zoning laws has made it.
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?
Scaleway DC5 is large by French standards, rather small by US hyperscaler standards. But the main reason is DC5 does not use classic cooling, thus does not have huge dry coolers outside, which definitely helps for noise (it's adiabatic cooling).
Another fact is just the sheer power density of those problematic north virginia datacenters. I'd bet us-east-1 is not an issue (old building and lower power density), but the newer AI ones are. Just take a look at how much AI clusters eat: a single DGX H200 box with 8 GPUs is 10kW. Most facilities provide 10kW for a whole rack, not 8Us. You're looking at 60kW racks, which is a mental power density: a single aisle trivially gets over the MW threshold. You used to feed rooms with megawatts. Heck, DC5 has 24MW of power, that's only 20000 H200 (again, think hyperscaler scale).
Still about cooling, the load profile is even different. DC5 is a general purpose datacenter, where the load is not full blast. Your AI datacenter has the GPU clusters full blast all the time. That's a LOT of power.
I happen to know pretty well the Scaleway infra and visited others of their datacenters. You can stand centimeters from the noise-dampening wall surrounding the dry coolers and not hear a thing; while almost needing noise protection within the wall.
us-east-1 region contains over 100 datacenters.
> 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.
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.
I already live and sleep next to my homelab, which is probably louder than those power plants