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Comment by redlewel | Hacker News Reader

I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them. The newer ones are using on-site generators that are insanely loud and require multiples more power than datacenters have historically needed. For a rack with traditional servers with just RAM/CPU/Drives, 5kW is sufficient in most cases.

When you have racks that are full of 4U GPU systems that pull 3-6kW each, the power requirements per rack shoot up to 60kW+(with whole rack setups blowing past 100kW). So an AI datacenter requires over 20x the power compared to what they needed in the past. This either strains the power grid near the DC or they need to create on-site power to fulfill demand, which has noise and other concerns.

I work near a datacenter and you can't hear significant noise from the outside, maybe a slight humming sound but quieter than traffic. This is a DC that has been around for over a decade and uses power from the grid since most of the loads are non-GPU based.

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I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.

They're a proxy for peoples' sense of powerlessness about what's going on around them.

Skyrocketing electricity prices, the sense that elected officials aren't looking out for their interests, job losses, etc. They're a convenient proxy for many disparate concerns because they represent all of those things in one way or another.

I think there's truth to what you're saying but I also think there's truth to what people are experiencing and perceiving.

A highly power and/or water consumptive data center being installed in a town or city is pretty much a perfect embodiment of people's frustrations. It consumes tons of power and/or water and therefore drives up utility costs for the locals or pollutes the air with diesel exhaust. And it doesn't create jobs so it's just frankly some rich cabal of capitalists getting richer while people's lives continue to feel materially worse. I can't think of a better embodiment of the sort of confluence of crumminess that seems to be underway.

https://www.tumblr.com/geneseelibby/35053843499/a-horrible-m...

Amazingly, they managed to _undersell_ the ill effects that the oil industry would have on even just the US, such as the oil-driven military actions we've taken over the years.

I've heard talk from some folks telling these people that their concerns about data center water use, power, noise etc. are overblown. Water companies disagree, saying data center water usage in fact is quite significant. Oops. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enou...

> In May, a House of Lords report said England faced a 5bn litre a day shortfall for public water supplies by 2055.

> Water UK estimated that datacentres in England use 6.6m litres of drinking water every day.

> England’s current water shortfall is 220m litres more a day than was assumed in water forecasts.

The UK is surrounded by a planet-spanning body of water. It has no excuse to be complaining about water shortages even if every square inch of it was a single giant datacenter.

Removing salt from ocean water is costly.

The UK can surely afford it. If not, then surely they can require the datacenters themselves to foot the bill.

> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.

The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries. They're starting to learn about the effect consistent noise at that level has on their mental & physical well-being as well.

The Pittsburgh steel mills provided jobs and a sense of purpose to communities.

Something that tech bros fundamentally oppose.

Town by me had a huge outcry about a proposed data center and how it would ruin the area. Funnily enough there's already data centers on the same street!

Thats what the parent comment said. Older data centers are built more consciously of the surrounding, but these newer ones are being built with no regard for the community and are egregious. For example using on site generators that make alot more noise than the existing on grid datacenters

You gotta read the comment

This new data center was air-cooled and would use the same grid as existing ones, so I found it funny that the complaints people made about it were either inaccurate or applied just as well to the existing DCs in the area

> The average person around them knows quite a bit about the noise level, and how far it carries.

Do they? How much noise do you imagine comes from a data center that isn't operating a gas turbine?

I believe there’s been a number of investigative journalists/ YouTubers that have looked into this and it can be quite staggering. Not just human audible noise but infrasound and ultrasound as well. IIRC Ben Jordan’s video “ Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons” would probably be a good place to start.

They could build these data centers to eliminate the noise but it’s cheaper to ruin the livability of surrounding areas.

Ultrasound is extremely non-penetrating and wouldn't make it through the walls of a building. Infrasound is the opposite and would go through most anything, and in principle can be produced by anything that moves, but the thing to care about at those frequencies is the amplitude, i.e. the sound volume. It's a meaningful concern from things like wind farms that have massive slow-turning turbines, but there is nothing in a data center that moves that kind of volume. On top of that, having multiple independent small sources in the same place lessens the effect, because multiple sources that emit at the same frequency but out of phase with each other cancel each other out.

Undoubtedly if you get some measurement equipment and stand next to a data center you could register some infrasound, but the same would be true if you stand next to an ordinary office building or in an empty field, because infrasound carries for hundreds of miles and there are much larger sources than data centers.

"There is a sound but you can't hear it trust me bro" is solidly into YouTube quacks territory.

>Ultrasound is extremely non-penetrating and wouldn't make it through the walls of a building

sometimes people like to be able to be outside. the 'quiet' part of the covenant of quiet enjoyment

When you're outside you're not inside the walls of a data center.

And not all of the noise is generated inside the datacenter, especially those with onsite turbines.

> How much noise do you imagine comes from a data center that isn't operating a gas turbine?

That video by Ben Jordan is emotionally convincing but it makes no solid case for any of its claims.

>I believe there’s been a number of investigative journalists/ YouTubers that have looked into this and it can be quite staggering.

The only thing staggering is the amount of trust placed in "YouTubers".

The average person is familiar with sound mitigation enclosures for generators and chillers? I kinda doubt that.

If noise regulations are in place where the data center is being built, companies that make chillers and generators will sell you an enclosure that reduces the sound level to comply with sound regulations. It’s not like these data centers are the first buildings ever to have a lot of generators and chillers installed, all non-AI data centers have plenty of each.

If you live in an unincorporated area and a data center moves in and there’s no sound regulations, then they can do whatever they want, but that’s the risk of living in an unincorporated area.

Right, and most people opposing datacenters don't _yet_ have one near them, so they don't have the direct experience yet.

Plenty of the people opposing datacenters are opposing them in places that already have datacenters. If there was a direct experience to be had, they would've already had it.

> I don't think the average person actually knows anything concrete about them.

A new class of oligarchs are trying to obsolete every profession and human endeavor for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. You don't need a PhD in environmental policy or domain expertise in construction to listen to what AI advocates are saying and realize their success comes at the expense of society, and say "no thank you."

Data center construction is not a proxy for powerlessness, but the vanguard of the powerful.

I think AOC made this point easy to understand in a recent hearing..

"ask ... if they [Zuckerberg, Thiel etc] want one of these data centers in their own backyard"

In Nashville they messed up by trying to build one next to the zoo, a beloved and popular attraction (higher attendance than our NFL franchise). The public outcry was swift and effective, new zoning rules were passed last night. https://nashvillebanner.com/2026/07/21/nashville-data-center...

That's great for future sites, but how is that going to improve the zoo's situation?

From reading the article, it sounds like one of the three items passed was an extension of a moratorium on data center building specifically for the area around the zoo. Another item involves eminent domain for the city to buy the land next to the zoo for use as city office space instead. So it pretty directly impacts the zoo's situation.

ah, I misread the comment as the data center was built by the zoo. skimmed past the "trying to" detail

It's that, but it's also that AI is not visibly providing any tangible benefit for most people. It'd be one thing if you had to tolerate a datacenter at the edge of town, but at least now you have a robot to fold your clean clothes. Instead, you get the threat of losing your job, the privilege of dealing with AI customer service chatbots, and higher energy costs.

I think most datacenter criticisms are actually coming from people who were going to oppose them anyway. Though a lot of their criticisms are valid, too.

Site selection also isn't very thoughtful. A lot of pre-AI datacenters were placed a good distance away from places where people live, but time to operation seems to be the overwhelming priority now which is pushing them to build right in the middle of or next to developed areas.

I don’t understand why they’re doing this? Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive they’d rather build on top or right next to housing? Is it the water supply ? I don’t understand why someone would do something so clearly self defeating

> Is extending the grid to their shiny new DC so expensive

Yes.

Source: learned more than I want to about solar farm development.

Anytime you see someone repeatedly doing a bad thing the reason they're doing it is because they want to do it and there are isn't sufficient push-back or consequences for doing it.

Until a country that is defended by nuclear weapons like France decides to send a few jet fighters to force the private jet carrying someone like Musk or Zuckerberg to land so that they can be arrested, tried, and convicted and forced to spend many years to decades inside a little box with little contact with the outside world this kind of stuff will keep happening.

Honestly, the stuff that the oligarchs are doing now is going to seem minor compared to what they'll be doing a decade or two from now if there's no push back.

The French government already did this to Pavel Durov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel... , which I'm sure people like Zuckerberg and Musk paid attention to and developed countermeasures for. After the arrest, Telegram started cooperating more with warrants from various countries' national police. Signal has better security and privacy guarantees than Telegram and is probably what ordinary people should be using instead of Telegram.

Isnt Telegram barely encrypted anyway

large, new, far out, grid hookups usually get done in units of years, you don't just call the power company and order one. I think a location with an existing connection to the power they need probably takes priority over every other location decision.

idk, at least in DFW the biggest datacenters from the late 90s and early/mid 2000s are in the suburbs where everyone lives. There's some in and near downtown but there's not enough space or it's too expensive. The big datacenters were built where the giant neighborhood were built, places with lots of land for relatively low cost.

Yes, the AI Datacenters are much worse for the environment. xAI is using methane-turbines to power theirs, and they are allowed to pollute your communities because they bribed the Trump admin.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/16/elon-musk... https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/elon-musk-... https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1014655584252361

I have some degree of sympathy for data centers, and anyone else that needs power, only because of how broken our regulatory state is on approving new transmission.

To be clear, it's not just data centers that have this problem. Journalists have been spilling digital ink on this topic as it relates to solar and wind farms as well. It's also part of the thing that'd hold back rapid deployment of nuclear.

If there's a strong enough economic incentive then yeah people are going to try to optimize around broken government.

The country first and foremost should serve all its citizens. Not just wealthy people and not just people of the dominant ethnic background. The xAI data centers sits right next to a poor african american community and Musk used emergency turbines that were not designed for continuous daily use. He utilized a loophole to get past those restrictions. Those turbines are burning gasses inefficiently and producing a lot of pollution that is directly harming those residents who likely don't even materially benefit from all this effort.

These people likely had nothing to do with the delay in solar installs, or decades of nuclear NIMBYism yet now because Musk cannot fall behind, they now have to suffer with no one in government caring about them.

Its a real life hell, they cannot physically resist or cause any trouble or else the government will come and kill them where they stand, they cannot afford to move away because who would buy their houses (and why should they abandon their life's community for something they had no part in?) so they sit and suffer day after day with declining health for their family. Framed like this, Musk is like a locust who has come to devour whatever good there was and then move onto the next prey.

Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. The datacenter I used to work at ran off the grid and was essentially quiet.

Is there really demand for 4000 plus data centers? I have a feeling that's shooting a bit above the mark (10x).

If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters, absolutely, it will be the most desired commodity in the world surpassing all others.

> If all the talk is true that something approximating human intelligence can be scaled simply by building more datacenters.

How can an "approximation of human intelligence" be "scaled by building more datacenters"? That doesn't even make sense. You don't need more datacenters to demonstrate that you have an "approximation of human intelligence", all you need is a lab and at most 1 (one) datacenter. Only after you've demonstrated you know how to deliver the goods, you can think about scaling, retail and marketing.

The demand for the current "approximation" is out there for all to see, it's nothing like the "most desired commodity in the world", in fact, it needs huge inflationary subsidies in order to sustain some sort of demand-for-show.

Precisely, if we expect AI/LLM progress to continue as it currently is, then data centers seem like a sure fire bet. They will just print money if AI reached that level.

The whole thing is a motte and bailey game. The largest of cloud companies might build a data center which is 1GW. There won't be 4000 of those and it won't be next to your house. A huge number of commercial office buildings already have a 100kW data center in them, and have for decades, without anyone having any reason to know or care. For those 4000 is certainly an underestimate.

> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now that companies are building them in a manner that disrupts the environment around them.

This would make sense if the ones being targeted are the ones that do this, but that isn't the case. Moreover, those would be simple to address, e.g. pass an ordinance that prohibits long-term operation of fossil fuel generators, defined as operating them for more than 40 days out of each 700. Or impose a reasonable decibel limit as measured at the property line.

Meanwhile people are proposing "data center moratoriums" and so on, even if the data center would be built in a non-residential area with a closed-loop cooling system and generate its power from a completely silent and non-polluting solar+battery system. Which makes it pretty obvious that the motivation is something else.

> I think this is because the demand is so extreme for datacenters now

Point to _any_ analysis that says the current building boom is anything but speculation.

xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.

DC buildout is purely a gold rush. A play to be the one left standing after all the weaker players die.

You are trying to pick a fight with a post that isn't making the point you assume it is. All that guy is saying is that there is a rush to build them, which is objectively true.

Whether or not the datacenters return on the investment is a different question.

There's a demand for data centers, but maybe not a demand for actual usages of the data centers. That's the distinction I think they were trying to make by pointing to existing data centers not even being used to full capacity in-house (and being rented out instead).

Speculative demand is still demand.

> xAI is renting out their DC space. I think I read that Google is, too.

You’re probably thinking of Meta. Google renting GPUs is a less recent phenomenon, to say the least.

xAI is renting out compute

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-2...

Speculation isn't a dirty word and both can be true.

Demand is very high today and exceeds capacity. Builders think demand will continue to grow. This seems plainly correct. Firms may differ in how high demand will go, but it is still more than today.

Inference is profitable and demand can't be met. They might eventually overshoot the mark but it hasn't happened yet and doesn't appear to be on the horizon.

I wonder how long till they start scooping up old abandoned towns?

That's what they should do. Datacenters don't need to be in anyone's backyard. The US has vast amounts of unused land as well as urban brownfields that are sitting empty. Put them there.

You're not getting it into an urban brownfield unless it comes with price controls on energy.

I live amongst the urban brownfields of Baltimore and our politicians are under tons of pressure to stop data center projects (and to tar and feather utility executives).

>(and to tar and feather utility executives)

Has anyone thought about perhaps tar and feathering the politicans and bureaucrats that wrote all the rules that make greenfield development with a transmission line tap a non-starter?

The developers would looooove to not deal with brownfields, not have pissed off neighbors, not deal in complex urban sites, etc, but greenfield above a tiny size is effectively outlawed piecemeal in many states.

Profits are high and bills are high it’s not that deep.

Heck, abandoned means those power generators are ripe for it, and that power plant you want to build? You've got the room!

> That's what they should do. Datacenters don't need to be in anyone's backyard.

at least in texas that's what they are doing, building them out in the middle of nowhere or close to the middle of nowhere. The issue that I keep seeing pop up is behind the meter power generation ( gas turbines ) is hitting roadblock after roadblock. There just aren't very many and GE is scaling up but i mean it's not like adding RAM in AWS, it's going to take half a decade to see the increased inventory to buy one let alone onsite and operational.

"...demand from utilities, data centers and other power users continues to stretch manufacturing schedules into the next decade."

https://www.compressortech2.com/news/ge-vernova-raises-gas-t...

some are resorting to using ocean liner engines to generate electricity.

"That naturally explains the recent order flow into large reciprocating engines. In April, the Finnish vessel engine manufacturer Wärtsilä Oyj Abp announced a 790 MW off-grid power solution for a new Texas data centre facility,"

https://globalalphacapital.cclgroup.com/insight/gacm-from-se...

They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.

Lol. A data center is no more than a industrial bread bakery (oddly specific i know). The entire anti-data US center is ran by China. EG. You can run a rack of servers in your closet. China is doing a great job.

Are you sure about that? I can't think of any bread bakeries pulling 2.2 gigawatts, which is us-east-1 pulls.

If you're complaining about us-east-1, you either moved into its backyard or didn't know it existed there for 20 years.

Don't think there was a complaint as you're interpreting. It was just an example of known power usage.

I’m in -3’s future backyard, but -1 has been there a while and is kind of the archetype of what a gigawatt facility looks like (the 2.2GW is spread across quite a few AZs, to be fair).

There are industrial bakeries that burn that much natural gas (powerwise); although the bakery probably smells better.

What bakery are you thinking of that pulls the equivalent of a mid sized nuclear power plant? Because you’re off by an order of magnitude I think. (2.2MW maybe)

I suspect the Nabisco plant in Chicago pulls about ~12 million therms worth of natural gas, at 30kwh per therm, that's pretty significant.

You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.

Shrug

You asked about energy usage; but I have no idea as to how that bakery's natural gas usage affects the people surrounding it.

The smell of freshly baked fig newtons might offset the possible increased cost of gas-per-cubic-foot.

I guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?

ok, but like, my stove uses some therms of natural gas, but its not at all comparable in terms of scale to a data center.

what makes this bakery comparable in terms of energy usage and pollution?

A quick google says that the entire city of Chicago draws about 3.4GW - are you saying that one bakery uses over 2/3 of the draw of the entire city?

No, he is saying that if they were to replace natural gas with electricity, it would use 2.2 gigawatts of electricity.

I don't think the conversion is as straightforward as they claimed. But they're also not claiming that they currently pull gigawatts of electricity.

I can attest for the smells better. Now, I'm left wondering which smells worse, an AI datacenter or a large beer brewery. As a kid, we had a Mrs. Baird's bread bakery which was in the heart of town that students would take field trips to see (which is no longer there and is now apartments). On the other side of town is a Budweiser plant, and it's infamous for being so odorific but it is located way the hell out there.

Yeah; an industrial brewery could smell off at times. But the ppl going on about datacenters as though it’s like a pulp mill or iron foundry relocating to your neighborhood are a little much.

I used to work nextdoor to the broadcast headquarters to an old sports cable network and their satellite uplinks. They had several diesel generators on site to ensure power never went down else their entire network went dark. If power was lost, they had batteries for immediate power that lasted long enough for the generators to kick in. When the generators kicked in, it went from being a nice quiet area to being in the parking lot of a truck stop with all of the engines running. If these new datacenters are powering themselves with generators, then yeah, I'd not want them to be around me either.

I think your ire at the discussion is pointed in the wrong direction.

Lol the entire pro-data US center is ran by elon musk and the other cronies that bribed the Trump admin to let them violate the clean air act. They use gullible losers that will swallow their propaganda whole and promise them "AGI."

https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo

Adversaries are happy to rule up democracies in any way possible, and it is foolish to think that there are zero concerns about placement of AI datacenters.

You need cooling, power, and at the data center I used to work at they literally ran out of power and couldn't get any more from the city. They actually built a new building in the parking lot so they had cause to request more power

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