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.