> Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.
> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote
Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.
I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.
> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.
Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.
It's getting difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and corruption, as widespread as both of them are, and how their consequences always overlap.
One of the ways corruption hides its intentions is lying to make it look like incompetence. It takes a very long time for the truth to come out and it rarely does but corruption depends on people buying the lies and assuming its just incompetence.
Incompetence should carry liability as well. If some politician signs his name to random documents without understanding what he's doing and causes harm to people, he should simply pay the price to make the other party whole, whatever damage was caused should be undone to the fullest possible extent and he should be removed from office for good measure because he's clearly too dumb to exercise it responsibly.
That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.
If anything it's not going far enough. Corruption should be considered high treason and lead to public executions.
As a common citizen, very few things in this world are more demoralizing than witnessing corrupt politicians get filthy rich while trading favors, embezzling money, creating loopholes for corporations to exploit while pretending to regulate them or whatever else it is that they do, there are so many scams it's impossible to enumerate them all. It breaks one's spirit to realize that it's the honest and the just who get punished on a daily basis while the corrupt get constantly rewarded. That is an incalculable crime against society and should absolutely be severely punished.
If they don't like it, they can just not be a politician. Nobody asked them to seek power, they fought to be there. Normal citizens get to go to jail, not them.
> But he that knew not and committed things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.
> For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required
> and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
Revoke their right to privacy. Normal citizens get to have privacy protections. Not them. They are in power to serve us. We should be entitled to know everything they are doing at all times. Let's see them try to scapegoat anyone then. If they don't like it just resign.
If a solution isn't working, it's probably because it's not extreme enough. Always go further. If they try to weasel out, preempt them. We aren't dealing with innocent lambs here. These are rich elites who graduated from top universities, high functioning sociopaths who absolutely have enough education and mental acuity to know right from wrong. They take an almost sadistic pleasure in not only subverting morality but in getting away with it. They don't just do things, they rub it in our faces that they did it and got away with it, and think us fools for not stopping them.
Corruption is power without responsibility. The more power you have, the more scrutiny you should be subjected to and the more consequences you should suffer.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to vote on it? How does a zoning rule about gas turbines get enacted at all, except by some body noticing that it's a problem and then voting to create such an ordinance? (Or by voting not to do so, if they think it isn't actually that much of a problem or if there's a way to mitigate it or if the benefits outweigh the costs, just like with any other issue that's within the purview of the county officials?)
> "It was only after the data center was operating, following a tour he took of the facility, that Turner said county officials realized the data center was “running in island mode.”
> “It was very impressive, but it was obvious that this is not what we thought was allowed,” Turner said."
Youve stated its corruption by officials. Its rather clear, however, that when the company were told that a grid connection would take 3 years that they found a way around it that didnt require further approvals.
Maybe there's corruption by officials at the local electric power company and that's why it takes 3 years to get an industrial grid connection. Or maybe there isn't actually any corruption happening and the local electric power company is just building out infrastructure slower or less efficiently than it could in principle be, for the ordinary sorts of reasons why things in this world are not perfect.
My wife and I travel in our RV a lot and used to full time. Some RV parks - even when full - are often totally quiet and peaceful at least enough to not notice a slight background noise of cars driving around here and there.
Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.
What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.
The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
Pretty sure Northern VA (datacenter alley) is doing pretty great?
Doubt they had to bend over backwards. This is one of dozens (hundreds now?) datacenters in the area.
The difference these days is that they now come with power plants in the parking lot. Otherwise they tend to be pretty quiet all things considered other than when backup generators are fired up during testing or power outages.
Cooling can be moderately loud, but the noise rapidly drops off with distance.
The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
The fundamental problem is that adjusting the regulations for new operations still delivers no equitable relief for people around the site that was let through. An industrial operation shouldn't get an indefinite pass of grandfathered use for finding tricks in the current regulations. Rather the turbines should be shut down in short order (~weeks), and then owners can figure out how to proceed with the foreseeable contingency - wait for the grid operator (or properly incentivize them), deploy their own solar and batteries or some other type of power generation that doesn't produce noise and air pollution externalities, and so on.
The article says that Michael Turner, the vice chair of the county's government, doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone. That makes it a lot harder to justify shutting them down. And potentially quite expensive, if they or their users can argue the county is liable for the costs.
You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.
> doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone
Talking about motivations would seem to be a smokescreen, a politician still trying to grease the wheels to allow the project to continue despite the harm to local residents. The point is that any engineer overseeing the deployment of turbines would have said "these things are loud" - it's an externality eminently foreseeable by the owner.
And yes, my point is that the theories of liability that would make the county liable for any of these costs need to be drastically curtailed. The responsibility for a datacenter owner trying to force their externalities onto existing land uses and failing should rest on the datacenter owner, not on the people whom they attempted to harm.
Yes, we should definitely increase NIMBY regulation by retroactively changing the rules on industrial development. The US is doing such a great job at building such projects already.
No thanks. Instead lets fix our inability to build a thing in this country by reducing NIMBY regulation so things like power generation can be built where it makes sense, and we are allowed to do things like build long distance transmission lines again. Also start funding these societal-level projects like our grandparents and great grandparents did to invest in our futures.
No datacenter operator wants to deploy their own power plants. It's due to the inability for anyone to get anything done that is not directly under their control. You would be waiting decades for projects to happen otherwise, like many have. Utilities have abdicated their responsibility to build for the future, and regulators have let them. Just like anything infrastructure related in the country. You are now seeing the direct impacts of this, and they will continue to increase regardless of if the cause is AI datacenters or whatever other popular thing we want to argue about next.
It's only "retroactively" changing "the rules" because "the rules" are an instance of regulatory capture limiting the policing of externalities to only ones that have been enumerated. Otherwise the general principle is that if you cause harm to other people, you are responsible for that harm. And industrial noise at all hours of the day is harm.
You'll get zero argument from me about the need to build more power plants and transmission lines. But this of course must be done with proper compensation to those affected, not just a regulatory giveaway after finding some disenfranchised area. In fact one might say that such regulatory giveaways have artificially lowered the expected cost of building a new plant below the actual cost, thus discouraging investment at the true cost.
You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
> You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
This is an interesting point I have not considered as much as I should have.
I think it's somewhat circular. As regulations become more and more restrictive on a "global" scale, "local" workarounds are going to become more common and more obnoxious to the local population. If a few jet engines in a parking lot impact 10 people in an extremely negative manner, but a 400 mile transmission line impacts 900 property owners through 90 political districts in a very minor way; the latter is going to be getting far more political scrutiny and be far harder to pull off even though it's better overall.
This will then tilt development into screwing the tiny minority since it's far cheaper and faster (practical) to get done. I don't think this is a good outcome for society over the long term as it erodes the social contract, but it's very interesting to think about how to solve.
But doesn't this trend directly tie back to the general point I'm making? Barring once-and-done things like illegal dumping of hazardous waste, "screwing the tiny minority" involves an ongoing process. It's only by the current legal conventions do we allow a one-time mistake in approval to keep on willfully causing harm indefinitely [0]. So when those 10 people inevitably complain in whatever higher jurisdiction might be able to do something about it, they're told too bad it's now a done deal.
Get rid of that regulatory subsidy in your example, and now working with 900 [1] property owners [2] for the predictable well-worn path becomes a more attractive alternative.
[0] Part of the problem is intrinsic to large sunk costs of capital investment, yes. But some is not - the data center still exists and can eventually be used for the purpose it was built for without the turbine generators, but the investors' desired schedule to full operation slips. I'd say this is effectively the same as any other project setback, and comes from something that was deliberately maintained as an unknown.
[1] was this number meant to capture only the people whose real estate is being bought for the right of way, or was it meant to include abutters as well?
[2] I'd say the main problems here stem from the high cost of real estate, especially developed real estate. Of course people get touchy when their single life-asset that they're scraping by to slowly own stands to be drastically devalued. And the higher cost pushes developers to try and avoid compensating everyone who is affected.
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
What portion of datacenters being built in the next five years go towards the existing Internet and why do we need more datacenters for the internet right now? I could point to a bunch of issues with the internet and more datacenters would fix none of them.
I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents.
The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.
A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff.
It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky.
We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years.
I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected!
A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal.
We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio.
As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power.
The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
> Point is, if you ban anything that makes noise you’ll be left with nothing, it’s pure selfish nimbyism
The US is large enough country and it should be possible to build DC far away from homes. That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY. I lived in 1km from a gas fired power station and did bot notice any noise at all. If a DC can be heard it is either too close or too loud.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Incumbent homeowners (and sometimes renters in rent-control situations) voting for policies that prevent new housing from being built near them is a huge reason why housing costs so much where I live; and reducing local housing costs is probably the single biggest way that policy changes could directly improve my quality of life.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
Some thing which get described as NIMBYism are better described as NIBYism.
A state housing complex is just housing. Not wanting that nearby is NIMBYism because it's about not wanting it specifically near your home even though it's, by definition, going to need to be done in a spot zoned for homes.
The question around a e.g. jet engine test site is very different though - more like "why would we need the jet engine test site to be within a mile of anyone's back yard in the first place"? Usually the answer is "we don't, it just kinda happened that way as the city grew".
There's no reason to torture the acronym just to avoid a perceived stigma. Not wanting something developed near you is NIMBYism. NIMBYism can be reasonable or unreasonable. You can label an opinion NIMBY as an implied insult or with no judgement at all.
It's less about associated stigmas and more about the usage of NIMBY becoming so generic as to lose value. I also doubt the removal of a single letter does much to fool people into forgetting about the stigmas anyways.
Not wanting a data center next to your home is now "pure selfish NIMBYism". This is how sick we are becoming. It's hideous that this is now how we treat people with homes in the US. Everything must get worse, and worse, and worse, and if you cry out against any single thing, you must be a selfish asshole.
It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
> It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
Same. We used to be a country that could get things done. Stuff like power generation and transmission lines were built out well ahead of expected demand, with resiliency baked in. Negative impacts were there, but understood as part of the whole living in society thing. Reasonable minds came together and made the best choices possible at scale and mitigated negative externalities to individuals as much as possible. We understood spending a decade on impact studies and lawsuits helped no one.
We decided to protect the absurd, so we shall get the absurd as workarounds. Folks (collectively speaking) didn't want transmission lines running through their farmland or whatnot, so now we get absurd workarounds like standing up gas turbines in datacenter parking lots.
It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, since this has become the only way to get anything done.
Sorry, NIMBYism is on the way out. We are building high density housing, cafes, restaurants, shops, data centers, and offices all next to each other. Nothing you can do about it.
I used to live near a busy street. I eventually got used to the noise but when I bought my house I made sure to find a quiet spot. Now, its dead quiet at night and the difference in my quality of life is significant. I also made the city put shades on the street lights so they wouldn't shine on my house. Another huge improvement.
Peace is the dream, which is being slowly killed. People who value peace are being pushed farther and farther out. You used to be able to find peace in neighborhoods, but more and more people have to choose between community and peace.
Seems a bit harsh. Have you experienced the noise being described here first hand? How can you be sure it is the same as what you are experiencing and find acceptable?
For extra amusement, try living near a farm or a school. Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.
I feel like the world needs more sound engineers. There's a constant humming of the machines and we all suffer for it. We also need more vigilance about preventing noise pollution. The beep, beep, beep may make a company feel like it is doing something for safety, but there is no counterforce that they have to answer to about what they are doing to everyone else not involved. (I know there is a better sound to replace beep beep beep but it hasn't made it to my neighborhood yet)
We would need to figure out a quantifiable metric for annoyance level. Municipal sound ordinances do tend to correctly utilize SPL(A) and SPL(C), with A-weighting being relevant for safety against ear injury (low frequencies have less influence) and C-weighting being relevant for annoyance level (low frequencies have more influence), but this isn't nearly enough. For example, ordinances carve out additional tolerance for burstiness, which makes sense for rare events like jackhammering but not for common events like routine plant operations. Sound with lots of harmonic content (think distortion) is more annoying than without. High frequencies can be worse if they reach you, but they're less likely to reach you (approaching a need for line-of-sight). It's complicated.
Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.
All the sound engineers in the world can't fix "don't care" and "want to".
A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).
Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.
The constant humming that causes the overwhelming population-weighted noise pollution comes from cars and airplanes, due to the fact that in America it is currently not legal to build an apartment except within 100ft of a freeway or at the ends of airports.
This just happened up north, apparently the largest proposed AI data center in Canada (Synapse's $10B 1GW campus in Olds, Alberta) was just put on pause after the Utilities Commission rejected its power application on March 6, 2026 due to noise pollution concerns from 20 gas turbines, 10 steam generators, and up to 600 diesel backups near 800 homes (just 200m away). The assessments failed to model cumulative worst-case noise. The proposal will be revised and resubmitted of course but the concern isn't going to go away.
The US seems like a pretty huge area for the number of people living there. Why do they need to build a data center 100m from a house, why not build it 1000m away?
I've seen a few videos with the audible whine heard from people's houses even super far away from these datacenters. Guess we'll see in a few years whether they were worth building in the first place or whether they end up abandoned once the bubble bursts.
I saw more than one video about datacenter noise that were clearly crypto mining. There are some questionable designs leveraging shipping containers and what sound like a lot of 120mm fans.
These AI datacenters generally have invested quite a lot in Nvidia Chips and completely high end hardware by having DDR5 Chips etc.
And even more than that, the largest things for these things is how to supply enough water properly and water-cooling systems which aren't required in traditional systems.
They also are very conditional and spike the grid up and down with their use cases slowing the grid.
If the bubble bursts, which it will, It's hard to justify the billions of dollars spent on AI specific datacenters for essentially the bricks and mortars. I don't think that its very sound decision that they were worth building, it might make some compensation but not enough, in my opinion.
Haha this is because of the on site gas turbines because we’ve decided that any power infrastructure is evil. You gotta love the NDFA that is the market finding the gaps in law to reach utility.
I live near a datacenter myself in San Francisco. No problems here.
Gas turbines emit an array of pollutants including nitrogen oxides, methane, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and formaldehyde that you should not be breathing.
You might not feel it right away, but the closer you are to these things, the more your health is going to suffer over time.
The point OP was making is that due to off-site power generation like it should be - there are no gas turbines built co-located with the datacenter they live near. As such, a datacenter is roughly as obnoxious (likely less so due to less traffic) as an office building or warehouse. Until recently most folks living near such a facility likely had no idea.
It's when we decide building any power infrastructure anywhere is evil we get absurdities like standing up jet engines in datacenter parking lots as insane workarounds.
It's basically impossible to build anything at scale when it comes to power. Solar, wind, transmission lines, nuclear, you name it. There will be a group of folks vehemently against it that ties most projects up so they don't even get proposed to begin with.
Low-frequency noise is insidious and an assault on your sanity. Wind turbines are bad for it. And hea_t pump$ to a lesser extent.
Blocking low-frequency noise requires very heavy, well-designed construction, and retrofitting a typical dwelling to achieve large reductions is difficult and expensive.
This means all the blame goes onto the perpetrators – the developers, the politicians – because for all intents and purposes, residents can't do anything to stop it.
Genuine question but is the problem datacenters or more specifically AI specific datacenters?
Because all these talks of data-center disrupting everyday's life from all the videos I have watched somehow now involve the AI/GPU aspect which have definitely made things more energy intensive and more water intensive
But more specifically compute focused datacenters actually feel somewhat good/neutral to the region and you still need remote hands etc. so net employment.
Although one of the ideas I have with that is it would be better if the owner of the said datacenter either belonged to the community/cared about it and wasn't a massive corporation for example too.
It's the AI bubble which is the issue which has caused a Datacenter frenzy as nameless corporations take massive debts to build them and scramble to do so and cause issues in the process.
In this case it is mostly the gas plants. They could have installed them far away, keeping the datacenter in place, or even better, use solar power. Or they could have built infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for datacenters to reside. In the end the problem is that maximum profit doesn't care about humans.
Sane municipalities, counties, and states have noise restrictions for power generation equipment, most of the AHJs in my metro area require no more than 60dB of noise from 100’ away for a generator, that would easily prevent gas turbines from operating.
It’s common enough that generator manufacturers make different levels of enclosures to comply with noise regulations.
It’s likely impossible to use gas turbines to generate power in my state unless they’re very far away from anyone, rules linked below. The only type of land with no noise restrictions is undeveloped land, so you can operate forestry equipment but not gas turbines.
States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.
> States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.
That’s a weird thing to say given the story is about Virginia.
> Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.
> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote
Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.
I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.
> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.
Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.
It's getting difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and corruption, as widespread as both of them are, and how their consequences always overlap.
One of the ways corruption hides its intentions is lying to make it look like incompetence. It takes a very long time for the truth to come out and it rarely does but corruption depends on people buying the lies and assuming its just incompetence.
Incompetence should carry liability as well. If some politician signs his name to random documents without understanding what he's doing and causes harm to people, he should simply pay the price to make the other party whole, whatever damage was caused should be undone to the fullest possible extent and he should be removed from office for good measure because he's clearly too dumb to exercise it responsibly.
That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.
> Incompetence should carry liability as well
I actually think there's something in there.
You had me in the first half, the last paragraph is going way too far.
If anything it's not going far enough. Corruption should be considered high treason and lead to public executions.
As a common citizen, very few things in this world are more demoralizing than witnessing corrupt politicians get filthy rich while trading favors, embezzling money, creating loopholes for corporations to exploit while pretending to regulate them or whatever else it is that they do, there are so many scams it's impossible to enumerate them all. It breaks one's spirit to realize that it's the honest and the just who get punished on a daily basis while the corrupt get constantly rewarded. That is an incalculable crime against society and should absolutely be severely punished.
If they don't like it, they can just not be a politician. Nobody asked them to seek power, they fought to be there. Normal citizens get to go to jail, not them.
> But he that knew not and committed things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes.
> For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required
> and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.
this happens in some places
https://nordictimes.com/world/china-executes-senior-official...
but the US venerates $$$ more than anything
Awesome!
Then blame shifts to the little guy being the scape goat. I mean it already happens in corrupt countries.
Revoke their right to privacy. Normal citizens get to have privacy protections. Not them. They are in power to serve us. We should be entitled to know everything they are doing at all times. Let's see them try to scapegoat anyone then. If they don't like it just resign.
If a solution isn't working, it's probably because it's not extreme enough. Always go further. If they try to weasel out, preempt them. We aren't dealing with innocent lambs here. These are rich elites who graduated from top universities, high functioning sociopaths who absolutely have enough education and mental acuity to know right from wrong. They take an almost sadistic pleasure in not only subverting morality but in getting away with it. They don't just do things, they rub it in our faces that they did it and got away with it, and think us fools for not stopping them.
Corruption is power without responsibility. The more power you have, the more scrutiny you should be subjected to and the more consequences you should suffer.
Or they don't see the problem. Someone's paying 600-900k to live in a townhouse 1000 ft from the runways at Dulles Airport
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?category=SEMANTIC&sea...
Reminds me of former Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner’s suggestion that deaf people buy homes near the airport.
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941105/1939991/oh...
Why wouldn't they be allowed to vote on it? How does a zoning rule about gas turbines get enacted at all, except by some body noticing that it's a problem and then voting to create such an ordinance? (Or by voting not to do so, if they think it isn't actually that much of a problem or if there's a way to mitigate it or if the benefits outweigh the costs, just like with any other issue that's within the purview of the county officials?)
Towards the end of the article:
> "It was only after the data center was operating, following a tour he took of the facility, that Turner said county officials realized the data center was “running in island mode.”
> “It was very impressive, but it was obvious that this is not what we thought was allowed,” Turner said."
Youve stated its corruption by officials. Its rather clear, however, that when the company were told that a grid connection would take 3 years that they found a way around it that didnt require further approvals.
Conspiracy theories are fun, but this isnt one.
Maybe there's corruption by officials at the local electric power company and that's why it takes 3 years to get an industrial grid connection. Or maybe there isn't actually any corruption happening and the local electric power company is just building out infrastructure slower or less efficiently than it could in principle be, for the ordinary sorts of reasons why things in this world are not perfect.
A consequence on our focus on legislation rather than the more natural legal apths of addressing these problems, e.g. easements and tort law.
My wife and I travel in our RV a lot and used to full time. Some RV parks - even when full - are often totally quiet and peaceful at least enough to not notice a slight background noise of cars driving around here and there.
Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.
What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.
The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.
> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?
Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.
Bending over backwards and giving zero tax rates will sure make our area prosper! It has never worked before, but this time, maybe it will!!
Pretty sure Northern VA (datacenter alley) is doing pretty great?
Doubt they had to bend over backwards. This is one of dozens (hundreds now?) datacenters in the area.
The difference these days is that they now come with power plants in the parking lot. Otherwise they tend to be pretty quiet all things considered other than when backup generators are fired up during testing or power outages.
Cooling can be moderately loud, but the noise rapidly drops off with distance.
The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.
The fundamental problem is that adjusting the regulations for new operations still delivers no equitable relief for people around the site that was let through. An industrial operation shouldn't get an indefinite pass of grandfathered use for finding tricks in the current regulations. Rather the turbines should be shut down in short order (~weeks), and then owners can figure out how to proceed with the foreseeable contingency - wait for the grid operator (or properly incentivize them), deploy their own solar and batteries or some other type of power generation that doesn't produce noise and air pollution externalities, and so on.
The article says that Michael Turner, the vice chair of the county's government, doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone. That makes it a lot harder to justify shutting them down. And potentially quite expensive, if they or their users can argue the county is liable for the costs.
You mention properly incentivizing the grid operator, but this is also not so simple. As Dominion describes in their FAQ (https://www.dominionenergy.com/virginia/large-business-servi...), providing power to a large datacenter is itself a substantial construction project, requiring its own permits and specialized components. It's not just a matter of paying enough to get some guys working overtime.
> doesn't believe they were trying to find tricks or deceive anyone
Talking about motivations would seem to be a smokescreen, a politician still trying to grease the wheels to allow the project to continue despite the harm to local residents. The point is that any engineer overseeing the deployment of turbines would have said "these things are loud" - it's an externality eminently foreseeable by the owner.
And yes, my point is that the theories of liability that would make the county liable for any of these costs need to be drastically curtailed. The responsibility for a datacenter owner trying to force their externalities onto existing land uses and failing should rest on the datacenter owner, not on the people whom they attempted to harm.
Yes, we should definitely increase NIMBY regulation by retroactively changing the rules on industrial development. The US is doing such a great job at building such projects already.
No thanks. Instead lets fix our inability to build a thing in this country by reducing NIMBY regulation so things like power generation can be built where it makes sense, and we are allowed to do things like build long distance transmission lines again. Also start funding these societal-level projects like our grandparents and great grandparents did to invest in our futures.
No datacenter operator wants to deploy their own power plants. It's due to the inability for anyone to get anything done that is not directly under their control. You would be waiting decades for projects to happen otherwise, like many have. Utilities have abdicated their responsibility to build for the future, and regulators have let them. Just like anything infrastructure related in the country. You are now seeing the direct impacts of this, and they will continue to increase regardless of if the cause is AI datacenters or whatever other popular thing we want to argue about next.
It's only "retroactively" changing "the rules" because "the rules" are an instance of regulatory capture limiting the policing of externalities to only ones that have been enumerated. Otherwise the general principle is that if you cause harm to other people, you are responsible for that harm. And industrial noise at all hours of the day is harm.
You'll get zero argument from me about the need to build more power plants and transmission lines. But this of course must be done with proper compensation to those affected, not just a regulatory giveaway after finding some disenfranchised area. In fact one might say that such regulatory giveaways have artificially lowered the expected cost of building a new plant below the actual cost, thus discouraging investment at the true cost.
You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
> You can also look at the onerousness of permitting processes (etc) as a result of a regime whereby once something is built, if it causes problems then nobody can do anything about it.
This is an interesting point I have not considered as much as I should have.
I think it's somewhat circular. As regulations become more and more restrictive on a "global" scale, "local" workarounds are going to become more common and more obnoxious to the local population. If a few jet engines in a parking lot impact 10 people in an extremely negative manner, but a 400 mile transmission line impacts 900 property owners through 90 political districts in a very minor way; the latter is going to be getting far more political scrutiny and be far harder to pull off even though it's better overall.
This will then tilt development into screwing the tiny minority since it's far cheaper and faster (practical) to get done. I don't think this is a good outcome for society over the long term as it erodes the social contract, but it's very interesting to think about how to solve.
But doesn't this trend directly tie back to the general point I'm making? Barring once-and-done things like illegal dumping of hazardous waste, "screwing the tiny minority" involves an ongoing process. It's only by the current legal conventions do we allow a one-time mistake in approval to keep on willfully causing harm indefinitely [0]. So when those 10 people inevitably complain in whatever higher jurisdiction might be able to do something about it, they're told too bad it's now a done deal.
Get rid of that regulatory subsidy in your example, and now working with 900 [1] property owners [2] for the predictable well-worn path becomes a more attractive alternative.
[0] Part of the problem is intrinsic to large sunk costs of capital investment, yes. But some is not - the data center still exists and can eventually be used for the purpose it was built for without the turbine generators, but the investors' desired schedule to full operation slips. I'd say this is effectively the same as any other project setback, and comes from something that was deliberately maintained as an unknown.
[1] was this number meant to capture only the people whose real estate is being bought for the right of way, or was it meant to include abutters as well?
[2] I'd say the main problems here stem from the high cost of real estate, especially developed real estate. Of course people get touchy when their single life-asset that they're scraping by to slowly own stands to be drastically devalued. And the higher cost pushes developers to try and avoid compensating everyone who is affected.
There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.
Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.
It's bad for my quality of life if some of the economic inputs to things I use (like "the internet", writ large) get made deliberately more expensive to build via regulatory fiat. Indeed, this is basically deliberate NIMBYism, and NIMBYism is why housing is scarce and expensive where I live. I don't want policymakers to be able to assert that the only possible use of a datacenter is something they find silly and then change the law to make them more expensive to build.
What portion of datacenters being built in the next five years go towards the existing Internet and why do we need more datacenters for the internet right now? I could point to a bunch of issues with the internet and more datacenters would fix none of them.
I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents.
The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.
I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.
A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.
It's due to lack of investment in the power grid on a generational timeline. We used up every bit of slack and extra capacity in the name of efficiency and not needing to spend the money on building stuff.
It's also nearly impossible to build large-scale things like long distance transmission lines - so even stuff like solar fields and wind farms are difficult to make pencil out these days. You are talking a decade or more to get anything big done, if you are lucky.
We ran out of parlour tricks like trying to game efficiency and curtail residential usage. We also ran out of industry to offshore. This was coming for us either way, just AI datacenter buildouts were unexpected and pulled demand forward some odd number of years.
I was always planning on building an off-grid power setup for exactly this reason - the writing was on the wall decades ago. It just came a bit sooner than I expected!
A large industrial scale power user that operates at roughly the same base power load 24x7 is an absolute dream customer for a grid operator. The fact we can't make the perfect customer profile pencil out without raising rates should be a giant huge red flashing warning sign with bells going off to everyone. Heck, these facilities can even typically participate in demand shedding programs on top of being ideal.
We've been living off the cheap power our grandparents invested in building for us. Time has come to pay the piper.
Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio.
But I guess this isn't how the world works.
As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?
Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power.
The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.
There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.
KWh, but yes. I'm in CA so we don't have data centers because the cost of a Kwh is already like $123134^100
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> Point is, if you ban anything that makes noise you’ll be left with nothing, it’s pure selfish nimbyism
The US is large enough country and it should be possible to build DC far away from homes. That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY. I lived in 1km from a gas fired power station and did bot notice any noise at all. If a DC can be heard it is either too close or too loud.
> That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.
It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.
Incumbent homeowners (and sometimes renters in rent-control situations) voting for policies that prevent new housing from being built near them is a huge reason why housing costs so much where I live; and reducing local housing costs is probably the single biggest way that policy changes could directly improve my quality of life.
Also, housing itself is often a genuinely noxious use of land for incumbent homeowners. In part because construction creates noise and dust and requires upgrading other local physical infrastructure - but also because more housing implies more new people living in an existing neighborhood, and additional people living somewhere can themselves cause problems for the incumbent residents.
NIMBY is an acronym: No In My back Yard.
Some thing which get described as NIMBYism are better described as NIBYism.
A state housing complex is just housing. Not wanting that nearby is NIMBYism because it's about not wanting it specifically near your home even though it's, by definition, going to need to be done in a spot zoned for homes.
The question around a e.g. jet engine test site is very different though - more like "why would we need the jet engine test site to be within a mile of anyone's back yard in the first place"? Usually the answer is "we don't, it just kinda happened that way as the city grew".
There's no reason to torture the acronym just to avoid a perceived stigma. Not wanting something developed near you is NIMBYism. NIMBYism can be reasonable or unreasonable. You can label an opinion NIMBY as an implied insult or with no judgement at all.
It's less about associated stigmas and more about the usage of NIMBY becoming so generic as to lose value. I also doubt the removal of a single letter does much to fool people into forgetting about the stigmas anyways.
Not wanting a data center next to your home is now "pure selfish NIMBYism". This is how sick we are becoming. It's hideous that this is now how we treat people with homes in the US. Everything must get worse, and worse, and worse, and if you cry out against any single thing, you must be a selfish asshole.
It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
> It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.
Same. We used to be a country that could get things done. Stuff like power generation and transmission lines were built out well ahead of expected demand, with resiliency baked in. Negative impacts were there, but understood as part of the whole living in society thing. Reasonable minds came together and made the best choices possible at scale and mitigated negative externalities to individuals as much as possible. We understood spending a decade on impact studies and lawsuits helped no one.
We decided to protect the absurd, so we shall get the absurd as workarounds. Folks (collectively speaking) didn't want transmission lines running through their farmland or whatnot, so now we get absurd workarounds like standing up gas turbines in datacenter parking lots.
It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better, since this has become the only way to get anything done.
Sorry, NIMBYism is on the way out. We are building high density housing, cafes, restaurants, shops, data centers, and offices all next to each other. Nothing you can do about it.
I used to live near a busy street. I eventually got used to the noise but when I bought my house I made sure to find a quiet spot. Now, its dead quiet at night and the difference in my quality of life is significant. I also made the city put shades on the street lights so they wouldn't shine on my house. Another huge improvement.
Peace is the dream, which is being slowly killed. People who value peace are being pushed farther and farther out. You used to be able to find peace in neighborhoods, but more and more people have to choose between community and peace.
Seems a bit harsh. Have you experienced the noise being described here first hand? How can you be sure it is the same as what you are experiencing and find acceptable?
For extra amusement, try living near a farm or a school. Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.
I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.
That industrial noise at night isn't required; it's just cheaper than being quieter.
The choices are not ban anything that makes noise and allow everything that makes noise.
> Also a state housing complex nearby with mentally unwell people screaming all night outside.
I think this would be the greatest annoyance to me, the other stuff becomes background noise eventually
I feel like the world needs more sound engineers. There's a constant humming of the machines and we all suffer for it. We also need more vigilance about preventing noise pollution. The beep, beep, beep may make a company feel like it is doing something for safety, but there is no counterforce that they have to answer to about what they are doing to everyone else not involved. (I know there is a better sound to replace beep beep beep but it hasn't made it to my neighborhood yet)
We would need to figure out a quantifiable metric for annoyance level. Municipal sound ordinances do tend to correctly utilize SPL(A) and SPL(C), with A-weighting being relevant for safety against ear injury (low frequencies have less influence) and C-weighting being relevant for annoyance level (low frequencies have more influence), but this isn't nearly enough. For example, ordinances carve out additional tolerance for burstiness, which makes sense for rare events like jackhammering but not for common events like routine plant operations. Sound with lots of harmonic content (think distortion) is more annoying than without. High frequencies can be worse if they reach you, but they're less likely to reach you (approaching a need for line-of-sight). It's complicated.
Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.
All the sound engineers in the world can't fix "don't care" and "want to".
A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).
Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.
It's the Simpsons "Everything's OK" alarm: (note: loud and annoying noise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxNp3bUDtxY
They could start with building codes. State of the art, beautiful new designs where you can hear every word of the meeting next door.
The constant humming that causes the overwhelming population-weighted noise pollution comes from cars and airplanes, due to the fact that in America it is currently not legal to build an apartment except within 100ft of a freeway or at the ends of airports.
That gave me a chuckle
Great video from Benn Jordan on data center noise causing illness to nearby residents: https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo
Depressing results. Thanks for sharing.
wow, super interesting. thx for sharing!
This just happened up north, apparently the largest proposed AI data center in Canada (Synapse's $10B 1GW campus in Olds, Alberta) was just put on pause after the Utilities Commission rejected its power application on March 6, 2026 due to noise pollution concerns from 20 gas turbines, 10 steam generators, and up to 600 diesel backups near 800 homes (just 200m away). The assessments failed to model cumulative worst-case noise. The proposal will be revised and resubmitted of course but the concern isn't going to go away.
Seriously, why do they have to build a DC 200m from homes? Is Alberta out of space?
The US seems like a pretty huge area for the number of people living there. Why do they need to build a data center 100m from a house, why not build it 1000m away?
utilities cost more to run further
I think you mean 'the utility hike due to the datacenter wouldn't be able to be shared split with the house then'.
The article very very carefully avoids contextualizing this site, so as a service, here you go:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sully+Rd,+Centreville,+VA/...
interesting that the data center noise is competing with a lot of airplanes and freeways
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This is where zoning rules make sense.
The aerial photo in the article makes the whole thing a little funny to me.
There are all kinds of externalities that we fail to accommodate in our market pricing.
I offer you a chatbot in this troubling time
I've seen a few videos with the audible whine heard from people's houses even super far away from these datacenters. Guess we'll see in a few years whether they were worth building in the first place or whether they end up abandoned once the bubble bursts.
I assume once the bubble bursts they'll be turned into power supplies for bitcoin miners
I saw more than one video about datacenter noise that were clearly crypto mining. There are some questionable designs leveraging shipping containers and what sound like a lot of 120mm fans.
Hopefully not, but they expect that scenario. For those as ignorant as me, I started reading this https://cointelegraph.com/features/the-last-bitcoin-btc-mine
They expect transaction fees will overtake minting earnings.
These AI datacenters generally have invested quite a lot in Nvidia Chips and completely high end hardware by having DDR5 Chips etc.
And even more than that, the largest things for these things is how to supply enough water properly and water-cooling systems which aren't required in traditional systems.
They also are very conditional and spike the grid up and down with their use cases slowing the grid.
If the bubble bursts, which it will, It's hard to justify the billions of dollars spent on AI specific datacenters for essentially the bricks and mortars. I don't think that its very sound decision that they were worth building, it might make some compensation but not enough, in my opinion.
Haha this is because of the on site gas turbines because we’ve decided that any power infrastructure is evil. You gotta love the NDFA that is the market finding the gaps in law to reach utility.
I live near a datacenter myself in San Francisco. No problems here.
Person in sacrifice zone, sees no problems.
Gas turbines emit an array of pollutants including nitrogen oxides, methane, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and formaldehyde that you should not be breathing.
You might not feel it right away, but the closer you are to these things, the more your health is going to suffer over time.
The point OP was making is that due to off-site power generation like it should be - there are no gas turbines built co-located with the datacenter they live near. As such, a datacenter is roughly as obnoxious (likely less so due to less traffic) as an office building or warehouse. Until recently most folks living near such a facility likely had no idea.
It's when we decide building any power infrastructure anywhere is evil we get absurdities like standing up jet engines in datacenter parking lots as insane workarounds.
It's basically impossible to build anything at scale when it comes to power. Solar, wind, transmission lines, nuclear, you name it. There will be a group of folks vehemently against it that ties most projects up so they don't even get proposed to begin with.
Person who probably has never lived next to an industrial site disappointed to find they don't like living next to an industrial site.
This is why we have zoning laws.
Can anyone provide a breakdown for what all these new data centers are used for?
Is this storage? If so, storing what?
Is this for AI/processing? If so, doing what?
Low-frequency noise is insidious and an assault on your sanity. Wind turbines are bad for it. And hea_t pump$ to a lesser extent.
Blocking low-frequency noise requires very heavy, well-designed construction, and retrofitting a typical dwelling to achieve large reductions is difficult and expensive.
This means all the blame goes onto the perpetrators – the developers, the politicians – because for all intents and purposes, residents can't do anything to stop it.
Genuine question but is the problem datacenters or more specifically AI specific datacenters?
Because all these talks of data-center disrupting everyday's life from all the videos I have watched somehow now involve the AI/GPU aspect which have definitely made things more energy intensive and more water intensive
But more specifically compute focused datacenters actually feel somewhat good/neutral to the region and you still need remote hands etc. so net employment.
Although one of the ideas I have with that is it would be better if the owner of the said datacenter either belonged to the community/cared about it and wasn't a massive corporation for example too.
It's the AI bubble which is the issue which has caused a Datacenter frenzy as nameless corporations take massive debts to build them and scramble to do so and cause issues in the process.
Vast majority of the new ones are for AI
The only thing Microslop's CEO cares about is that he can't get enough buildings to fill with machines
In this case it is mostly the gas plants. They could have installed them far away, keeping the datacenter in place, or even better, use solar power. Or they could have built infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for datacenters to reside. In the end the problem is that maximum profit doesn't care about humans.
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Sane municipalities, counties, and states have noise restrictions for power generation equipment, most of the AHJs in my metro area require no more than 60dB of noise from 100’ away for a generator, that would easily prevent gas turbines from operating.
It’s common enough that generator manufacturers make different levels of enclosures to comply with noise regulations.
It’s likely impossible to use gas turbines to generate power in my state unless they’re very far away from anyone, rules linked below. The only type of land with no noise restrictions is undeveloped land, so you can operate forestry equipment but not gas turbines.
States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/p-gen6-01.pd...
> States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.
That’s a weird thing to say given the story is about Virginia.
*Medicaid