Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating
Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming.. the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating
I grew up in Northern Virginia, (of AWS US-East-1, MAE-East, and Equinix fame), where there are more data centers than anywhere else in the world, and I never heard organized opposition to them until the last couple of years. They were mainly viewed as a way for Loudoun County to build their industrial tax base without the downsides of having industrial workers, and allowed them to consistently lower property taxes while having excellent schools. Data centers are unsightly and use electricity and water, but so does literally any kind of industrial facility. They are also pretty quiet, if you exclude the ones using on site gas turbines for electricity.
Property values have consistently gone up in that region for decades, and are up to $6 million an acre if there's enough contiguous land to put another data center on.
Many of the people complaining about datacenters would also complain about literally any kind of development.
You got good data centres, and their construction and operation were likely regulated.
The problem is that apparently you can just ignore that by building in poor places that won't hold you accountable and perhaps don't even have the regulations. If they do, just don't comply with them. Then your gas turbines can be as loud as you like, nobody will stop you. There's this one weird trick where you can pretend your generators aren't turned on, but they are, and they pollute badly. Nobody will call you out on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw
Also you can take people's drinking water to cool your data centre, and promise a water recycling plant, and then just not build it.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/05/xai-water-reuse-pro...
What I forgot to mention is this one weird trick only works if you're a turbo-bastard with an enormous bank account, and the government of the poor place thinks it's in line for a payday.
Well yeah, if you vote to have fucktards run your state or county, you’re going to live under fucktard conditions.
The US is very different from Europe. You have enormous amounts of space so even a Data Center that is "close by" is probably still a mile or more. In smaller places like European countries, the data centre wall might only be 100 yards or less from the back of your house so the proximity blocks light and makes you feel encroached on, even if no-one is peeping. In lots of cases, the center might have been built on open land so it is not surprising people don't appreciate their view changing from open land to "very large and tall building"
No? I live very close to Loudoun county, there's DCs across the road from homes.
The new gen of AI-boom-construction datacenters seem to be substantially different than the ones I used to go when working at companies whose software ran inside them. Those were running air-cooled rack servers, which is a whole different world from these things. The couple of the new gen I've seen have been much larger and much more turbine-happy.
i'm confused on the humming part, i've driven by them many times and they're just...large, sorta ugly, buildings. but that's really it. i wonder if i walked up to a building i'd hear the humming. quite surprised to learn that they emit a humming that bothers nearby folks
I haven’t been in an AI data center, but have been in several others, and worked in a smaller one. I never really hear anything until I open the door to a computer room… and I’m one of those people who is bothered by the electrical noise in my walls.
Maybe those complaints are for datacenters using gas turbines for power. I think some of the recent ones (xAIs?) was built without sufficient power from the grid.
xAI colossus was built without sufficient grid power, so uses "mobile" gas turbines to generate power.
It's absurd, and serves as evidence that we need a confiscatory wealth tax, if we want to maintain a society.
For me, it is evidence that our ability to build new power stations has seriously eroded, mostly due to bureaucracy, and that we need to fix this if we want to maintain competitiveness.
Consider the following graph which shows the power generation capabilities of China vs. the US during the last 40 years.
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-electric-slide?utm_source=sub...
The fact that data centers need to resort to gas turbines is downstream from this bureaucratic, NIMBY-driven impotency.
There is power available in the country. It is not available in arbitrary quantity, to arbitrarily selected buildings, on arbitrarily short timelines.
That said, I agree we need more power generation in this country. Massive rollouts (like in China) would bolster industry while being beneficial to nearly every citizen except those dependent on legacy energy technologies.
Sadly, the party in power opposes the most scalable approaches to this because greatly expanded power generation would hurt margins for a few special interests.
I’ve been to datacenters, but not the huuuge ones people seem to talk about in the context of AI. They are noisy inside (due to air cooling, which is largely avoided by the tech in the OP), but they’re entirely unremarkable outside compared to any other commercial or industrial building. Computers are not inherently loud, nor is power conversion.
Power plants are all over, even in populated areas. They’re not so bad either (except perhaps coal).
There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.
On-site natural gas turbines at a handful of DCs are genuinely loud. In general I agree that DCs are mostly fine neighbors, but maybe louder power plants aren't.
Yeah this is it. You can make really nice datacenters that are basically quiet and environmentally perfect. This was never in dispute.
But that is not how corporations roll. They want the cheapest shit that they can get away with. No regulations only corruption. Which is middle of nowhere America.
they just want data centers now. most companies would rather use solar, but they can't on short timelines due to land use regulations (and import tariffs)
And if they put them in the middle of nowhere, I don't see why there's a problem.
What I don't understand is putting these things in populated areas.
Would you like to work in the middle of nowhere?
After construction, not all that many people work at a data center. Some ops staff, maybe a small security team.
So let's spit on those 'not so many people' from our ivory tower?
Besides, it's not about people, it's about power. Pulling a few MW into middle of nowhere is prohibitively expensive.
30 minutes outside of the suburbs doesn't sound like an awful commute.
If they can be deployed in low-earth orbit with nobody working on them, they can be deployed 20 miles east of Bumfuck, Nebraska with nobody working on them.
The physical threat model of the Nebraska option does not rely on the tyranny of the rocket to keep intruders away.
It's like anything else in this world. Corner cutting and being shitty leads to shitty outcomes
When I was building data enters in populated areas there were regulations for noise, visual signature, power usage, and etc. It looks like a lot of these newer sites are in low regulation areas. Which is great for profit margin, and not so great for neighbors.
Sounds like the “don’t tread on me” crowd is about to find out the value of regulation.
>There is no fundamental reason that datacenters need to be especially unpleasant to their neighbors.
Sure there is, being a good neighbor costs more than being a bad neighbor
It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive. It is really an issue.
I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.
IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway
> I don't have any datacenters near me but I can hear some heavy hums from the washing machine 3 floors up when it put my head on my pillow, for some reason it just propagates through the building physically. When I walk around I don't hear it. Datacenter noise can be the same.
Right. Vibration propagates through solid (and liquid) materials.
But this can all be measured and controlled, and there's nothing special about datacenters. A building that is hundreds of feet away will couple to your pillow much less strongly than a washing machine in your building. And the washing machine often has a wildly unbalanced load and minimal decoupling between itself and the floor, whereas a big fan in a datacenter or other industrial building ought to be balanced and also ought to be installed on decoupling mounts.
If datacenter operators (cough xAI) are being lazy about properly selecting, installing and maintaining equipment, then you can have a problem. Otherwise you have a much smaller problem.
> IMO they should be put away from habitation, there's no reason for them to be near there anyway
I agree, but that's a hard problem (in the US anyway). Unless you're plopping data centers in the middle of national parks, or in the middle of the desert where water is going to be a problem, you are nearly always going to be within some small mile radius of civilization. Plus the cost of trenching new fiber out in the middle of nowhere.
The same reasons humans want to concentrate in a particular area (access to jobs, infrastructure) are the same things that data centers need.
Once water-less cooling tech like this improves then yeah, just plopping them in the middle of the unpopulated desert becomes viable (assuming you can get the fiber out there and latency is tolerable), so long as they generate their own power.
The climate requirements to run at this hotter temperature still probably means it'll require more active cooling in the desert during daytime /summers. Assuming we're talking about hotter desert environments like US southwest. That might make your proposal not as economical.
Imo we should just solve the problems with data centers being near cities. Manage/regulate the noise and any waste (heat included, it shouldn't drastically impact the neighbors) and make them pay for any utility capacity/reliability upgrades needed. If this article is right and water usage can be nearly eliminated then it seems like the rest should be solvable? Especially if we can take the extra heat and use it for local power or heating needs.
You might (but probably not) be able to do district heating with this, but electricity generation is not going to be efficient. Heat is a very low grade form of energy, and you need a large differential to drive a turbine efficiently.
If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta. That isn't even enough for district heating, probably not even with heat pumps.
Now if you have something like a steel foundry, that have much hotter cooling water, you can absolutely use the heat for district heating, but even then it usually isn't enough for cost effective electricity generation. Even when it is waste heat, as the equipment to handle it still costs money and requires maintenance.
> If you cycle between 45 C and 55 C water temperature (as mentioned by the press release), you are only getting a 10 C delta.
You are calculating the wrong delta T. To heat a space, you need your working fluid to be warmer that the space you’re heating by an appropriate amount.
55°C is certainly on the cool side to heat a building, but it’s entirely workable with a high-area, highish-thermal-conductivity system. Here’s an actual chart:
https://www.warmboard.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/WaterTe...
You don’t actually want an absurdly warm floor.
Even for buildings that need warmer fluid, water at 45-55°C is a fantastic source for a heat pump.
55 C might be enough to heat buildings but it's right on the edge where domestic hot water needs to be to kill Legionella. So traditional DH systems need to run hotter.
There low-temp/cold DH systems out there that rely on heatpumps in the buildings to extract the heat. Less losses in the network and you can even use them for cooling, but needs heat pumps everywhere.
In comparison, a traditional heat exhanger is pretty simple technology; just a hunk of metal with a valve.
> It depends a lot on things like geology and some people are a lot more sensitive.
People said this about high voltage electric lines and wind turbines. Blind tests proved they were imagining things.
Look up Benn Jordan's video on datacenter infrasound. Just because you can't perceive the noise doesn't mean it's not there and it doesn't have an effect on the human body, especially over very long periods of time.
That infrasound video is nonsense:
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
I was a regular viewer of Benn Jordan until seeing one of his videos about how Apple sucked because the iPad was incompatible with so many MIDI and DAW controllers. He went through his devices one by one, plugging them into the iPad and then showing that the iPad didn't recognize the device.
I thought it was a joke of some kind and eventually he would give the "reveal" but no, he finished the video without ever considered that USB is a host/device connection - and although USB-C confusingly introduced a symmetric cable, you cannot connect two devices back-to-back (one end has to be a host) and expect anything useful to happen. And that's why Apple sells a "camera" kit to allow an iPad to act as the host to USB devices.
Seeing him use an oscilloscope to diagnose an Ethernet issue in an earlier video had given me the expectation that he was technically knowledgeable and interesting. So it was shocking that he could present conclusions with such a confident and knowledgeable air, having missed such a basic and fundamental fact about USB.
And there was no push back in the comments that I could see at the time - so seemingly half a million viewers would have finished the video feeling they had learnt something.
Do you? I live at 4th and Brannan and there was one just off 3rd and Brannan in San Francisco. It was shut down when hosting.com sold it off but I didn't notice it while walking by then and I don't notice it while walking by now.
My GPUs at Hurricane Electric in Fremont are also completely unnoticeable outside the building. Inside, when I'm working at the cabinets it's obviously deafening. Outside you wouldn't even know. Realistically, the predominant sounds at my home are from the traffic on the Bay Bridge so it's nice when there's congestion because it's quiet.
Honestly, I wish there were more urban datacenters. It's getting quite annoying having to make a 1 hr trek to Fremont every time I want to rack a new server.
> Honestly, I wish there were more urban datacenters.
There's a lot of them in high rise buildings... but they come with high rise rent.
Imagine if one of the amenities in a high-end residential building could be a cabinet haha! That would be amazing. Doesn't make economic sense, but I'd love it. Would love to explain that to my wife. "I know that one has the pool, but we can rack my servers in this one if we live there".
Something here about water usage, a small data center, and a swimming pool. Combining the three may either be awesome or tragic!
I like this idea. A small cage in an apartment complex would be a huge selling point.
Or even a La La Land on the corner, urban DC in the back. Winning across the board.
> water usage, a small data center, and a swimming pool
Swimming pool? The cooling can be for a hot tub!
Noise is a design choice and could likely be legislated away. Reject heat is different than heating from greenhouse gas effects that are “heating the planet”.
No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.
> No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.
I find their noise pretty obnoxious. Out of respect for my neighbours, when I get around to installing one, I'll be getting the absolute quietest model available.
> No one bats an eye when an air conditioner runs.
In the US
Now do heat pumps in the winter.
Data centres aren’t loud it’s the gas power generating stations next to them that are loud.
Couldn't imagine living with the ~55dBA noise literally all the time
It sounds like with this liquid cooling, they won’t need the fans?
They almost certainly need fans on the outside of the building to cool the 55C water back down to 45C. But correct, no fans on the servers themselves or even in the building. Except perhaps for the humans, so they can stand to work inside the building, when needed.
Some systems use liquid cooling for the GPU and CPU, but air cooling for the PSU, RAM and SSDs.
With that said, by the standards of industrial sites data centres are quiet, low traffic and smell free. An industrial area that can’t build a data centre certainly can’t build a steelworks or oil refinery or leather tannery.
If the outdoor temperature is cool enough (maybe 30C?), you just pipe the liquid outside through a large enough loop or heat exchanger to get it back down to under 45C. Even better if you can put the loop in a lake and dump the heat there (maybe not better from an ecological POV though). The pumps moving all that liquid becomes the noisiest component.
The humming are the gas turbines which also damages your health.
>the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating
Nearly 10x more people die from the cold than from the heat.
"...9.43% of global deaths were attributable to non-optimal temperatures, with 8.52% from cold and 0.91% from heat."
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
This study doesn't factor in droughts, floods, crop death (and starvation), and other non-direct effects. It also doesn't consider wet-bulb events, because it's looking at average ambient temperatures.
I don't think this is climate change propaganda, but your application of this study by evoking it in a discussion about climate change feels like it.
Deaths from all natural disasters have dramatically decreased over the last century.
I won't bother sharing the source because you'll find some reason to dismiss it I'm sure.
It's interesting you claim my comment is propaganda when I cite a scientific source and yet have nothing to say about the parent comment which claims we no longer need to worry about heating due to climate change. Which of those comments seems more propagandistic?
Coldest month average temperature where I live is around -7C, with peaks of -35C. Climate change is not going to increase that average, more like decrease. Typically, of course, electricity price is the highest during that month too.
I think we are going to need heating.
>Do you live near a datacenter? Property value goes down, constant humming
I don't live next to one but I'd take constant humming over the constant stop/go traffic noise, honking, squeaky brakes, slamming doors and revving engines I now have on my western side of the apartment, thanks to the unemployment office the city opened on my street not too long ago.
So how come constant humming is somehow an illegal nuisance, but we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine?
My parents apartment have constant humming anyway thanks to the HVAC system on the roof of the nearby supermarket and white/brown noise is far more tolerable and easy to tune out than traffic noises.
> we've been expected to put up with the much more annoying urban traffic noise for decades just fine?
For one, there tends to be little traffic at night when most people want quiet in order to sleep. Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept. It is much harder to accept a new source of noise near your home you haven't asked for and don't directly benefit from.
> Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept.
This reads a little too close to driving being an inherently good thing or some sort of objective requirement, but it's only that way in certain urban places because the built environment makes it as arduous as possible to do those things without.
Something that pisses me off about many urban places that don't even otherwise require people to drive, is that many who do use their cars the most often have their neighborhoods protected from the noise they contribute to everywhere else. This whole thing of putting apartments only where there's already the most disgusting car-infested thoroughfares; "sorry, can't have an apartment one street in off the main drag, that's only for bungalows! Don't like it? Get richer. Excuse me while I drive through your bedroom and park for free in front."
>s that many who do use their cars the most often have their neighborhoods protected from the noise they contribute to everywhere else.
This, so much this. All the noise producing infrastructure in cities is dumped in the highly dense poor areas, and the rich people living in the quiet suburbs in single family home who need to drive in front of your home, are protected by this externality.
I live nearby a road going down a coulee that dickheads love to speed down in warmer weather at night. I'd trade that for a hum any day.
More noise categories should be illegal or fined in dense areas, not less
Agree, but data centers are no inside dense areas though.
They're being built in the US next to people's houses with gas turbines
https://xcancel.com/BrianEntin/status/2067930868191035474?s=...
To me that only makes clear that gas turbines are the noise issues, no data centers. Surely there exists data centers that work off the main power grid and don't have a natural gas turbine as their own power source.
How dare those nasty, dirty, unemployed live their lives under likely desperate circumstance. They are so much worse than corrupt oligarchs pumping and dumping their way into the greed hall of fame.
> the way we heat up the earth right now, i don't think you have to worry about heating
So what, winters would be no more? Snow will disappear, no more ice-men and christmas trees, and subzero conditions in general, too?
And no more food. Or at least not enough of it to feed very many people.
You do eat, don't you?
Christmas food?
As the earth has warmed over the last century, has food production increased or decreased?
If production increased (dramatically) while temperatures increased in the past, could this trend continue?