Life next to 199 data centres
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#2Article 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 :(
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#3Article 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 :(
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.
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#4Article 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 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.
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#5Article 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 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?
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#6Article 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.
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#7It's sad seeing people impacted by these data centers considering how little voice they have. I don't think anyone wants to live near a data center unless they actually worked there.
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#8Article 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 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?
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#9Article 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?
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.
Re: Life next to 199 data centres
#10Article 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 :(
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,