Destroying a Community with a Gigantic "Clogged Vacuum Cleaner" | Hacker News Reader

Destroying a Community with a Gigantic "Clogged Vacuum Cleaner"

gizmodo.com

87 pointsghuroo170 comments

Can someone explain why the new crop of datacenters are considered to be noisy?. I've been around the Wall Street datacenters in Jersey and they are basically the same as nondescript office buildings surrounded by a fence. The ones running on generators 24/7 are a problem but what is making the rest such an issue?

I wrote this in another reply here, but from this article and others I've read on Space X's/Tesla's datacenters, it's the use of turbine generators that cause that enormous whine sound. (Note how similar it is to a jet engine.) I live in Ashburn, where we have datacenters all over the place. But none of them sound like this. At worst, we get a dull hum, much lower in volume, if the air handlers are working especially hard. But you need to be on top of them to hear that.

Ashburn has the infrastructure however. From what I'm reading, other places don't. So they bring in power on-site, and it seems to be much less regulated.

Usually I think they're trying to get the infrastructure, but because we've created a permitting nightmare across the US, they can't get the permits for anything they want, so they're stuck with mobile generation that doesn't require much permitting.

Edit: I don't think it SHOULD be this way, but downvoting me doesn't change that, only organizing for changes does.

Using unpermitted turbine generators[1] is just as illegal as violating the other permits they’d need to obtain for grid access. Doing illegal acts is a choice on their part — no one is forcing them to do that. There is no inherent right to private profit at the expense of the social good.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...

That article's author says it's illegal. Neither the EPA nor a judge have made any judgments about Colossus generators being illegal (in fact, it doesn't sound like the EPA has made any enforcement actions at all, to date).

The article is about the EPA issuing a new rule (see the link behind "declared" in the article you linked to) closing the "nonroad engine" loophole, which the author of the article asserts makes those turbines illegal. The same new rule created a new subcategory allowing turbines for up to 24 months with streamlined compliance, and left a path open to EPA certification for turbines under Title II.

But the Colossus 1 turbines were already permitted by the time that article was published. At least 2/3 of the Colossus 2 turbines are permitted already too.

In the next month, there'll be a preliminary injunction hearing for the NAACP's lawsuit, but the DOD and DOJ both oppose the suit, so we'll see.

The companies doing this in Texas aren't even using that nonroad engine loophole - they're just getting Texas' minor permits. The EPA said in June that they're not going to create national rules, and instead defer to states. So you're seeing Virginia tighten regulation, and Texas loosen it.

So frankly, no, none of it is illegal. I think you're right that it should be, but that's a different problem, and not one you can help fix by claiming it is. If you want all this to be cleaner, go fix permitting for fixed clean energy generation, because it's a disaster.

Perhaps an un-fun fun fact if you're living near one of these, but Boom aerospace has pivoted to start selling turbines for data centers in addition to its normal business.

Not sure they got to having a normal business yet. Hopefully they don't just pivot entirely to energy.

There are no turbine generators at the DC in the video and that's not what gas turbine power plants sound like. they're much higher pitched.

But yeah, the ones with the turbine generators are even louder and more shrill. The xAI DC in Memphis last year had thirty five portable gas turbine generators.

That’s 35 jet engines operating at high power coming to a neighborhood near you. Sounds like fun.

35 consumer drones delivering 35 chunks of metal.

lol

These simple natural gas turbine generators are also massively inefficient - the same natural gas used in a combined cycle district heating plant would have its energy used much more efficiently, but here instead most of it ends up as waste heat, for the same amount of CO2 generated.

Not to mention the same natural gas could be used for chemical processes, like fertilizer production. You know, helping make the stuff we eat to survive.

Last I checked, you can't eat AI.

Datacenters are fine, its gas turbines making the noise.

Whats crazy tho is people repeating this as if its true of all datacenters.

Whats even crazier is fringe australian politicians WHO LIVE NEAR DATA CENTERS importing this and claiming all datacenters in australia are noisy (because some terminally online seps were complaining about it) without so much as going down to their local and testing the hypothesis.

What I find interesting is that having lived in the southeast US for decades now, there is never any shortage of a story where someone buys a house near a race track. Not long after that, they complain that the race track is loud for several days in the week. Generally what follows is lots of posturing by local politicians and judges. Inevitably the race track shuts down within a year or so, usually because it isn't worth the legal battle.

Yet somehow data centers that apparently make awful noises 24/7, local lawmakers are suspiciously unable to do anything about.

Same with regional airports. People who knowingly bought houses near a critical small local airport can band together and get it shut down because it's loud, but somehow doing it to a data center is a bridge too far??

A race track is a normal business trying to make money, so its operators rationally fold rather than almost certainly losing money even if they win in court.

An AI (or crypto mining) datacenter is fundamentally a financial fraud (or most charitably, in Mr. Greenspan's immortal phrasing, a result of "irrational exuberance") that has taken physical form. Nothing about it is rational, and their operators are happy to waste millions fighting even doomed legal battles to keep the music playing so they don't have to grab a chair.

>An AI (or crypto mining) datacenter is fundamentally a financial fraud (or most charitably, in Mr. Greenspan's immortal phrasing, a result of "irrational exuberance") that has taken physical form.

I really dislike the modern trend of trying to recategorise things when you dont like them.

A datacenter is in the business of providing power and rackspace to a customer. The customer is in the business of providing compute to AI users or a crypto network. That you are vociferously opposed to those pursuits does not invalidate them in any way.

>and their operators are happy to waste millions fighting even doomed legal battles to keep the music playing so they don't have to grab a chair.

What does that even mean.

Over time, improvements have been made in compute density, because more compute density means more money.

Higher compute density means higher thermal density, which means more powerful cooling is needed.

Server cooling solutions follow a management triple constraint: cheap, effective, quiet, pick up to 2.

Because loudness does not incur additional costs (due to negative externalities), "quiet" is the point of the triangle which gets most often sacrificed.

Blockchain has higher compute density. Nobody was bitching when the miners built out their datacenters.

The mining datacenters beat the AI datacenters to the punch on that, actually:

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/bitcoin-mining-noise-driv...

Since they don't need a lot of bandwidth they prefer to build out in the middle of nowhere. Ai data centers and data centers In general can't do that cheaply because they need higher bandwidth so they need to be closer to fiber optic lines which are often close to communities

Edit: the noise at many of these DCs are also "portable" natural gas turbines, intended for use as emergency power or temporary power at large events. But companies like xAI are using them to back-door build large power plants. xAI's memphis DC has 30+ turbines running non-stop and xAI never filed any paperwork or received any permits related to them.

AI DCs use enormous amounts of power (and thus generate enormous amounts of heat) compared to "traditional" DCs. We're talking hundreds of megawatts, sometimes gigawatts. 1GW DCs have been popping up already.

OpenAI is planning a 10GW facility in Ohio that will need its own natural gas power plant. A 10GW natural gas power plant is massive. Currently the largest NG combined-cycle power plant in the US is about 3-4GW and comprises several combined units. Typical size of a NG plant is more like 500MW.

To put that into scale: a very large Manhattan skyscraper is in the 10-20MW range, so OpenAI is planning to use as much electricity as, well, all of Manhattan's skyscrapers and then some.

Since NG turbines are at best 60% efficient, the plant itself will generate ~6 GW worth of waste heat (remember: combined cycle, so they've already extracted as much heat as they can for power.)

10GW of heat is the same amount of energy as the amount of heat from solar radiation hitting roughly 10 square miles of the earth's surface.

It's also the difference between evaporative coolers which don't need as high static pressure, and dry coolers which need to force air through more dense air-liquid heat exchangers and also have to move more air.

Where people have pushed back on water consumption, rates have been raised (water deparments are increasingly going to nonlinear billing scales which charge people more per unit when they use more) or water just isn't available - datacenter operators have had to switch to "dry" cooling where coolant or refrigerant passes through a giant radiator.

Much less effective than evaporation. So you need to move a lot more air, and it also has to be done through a radiator, which probably has higher static pressure than an evaporative cooling tower.

Yeah but with 10GW we can generate more AI videos of politicians to trick boomers. It's worth destroying everything for that.

In this case it has nothing to do with AI

> these are largely crypto mining rigs making this noise

I think in this case it's HVAC?

A lot of hyperscale data centers, often built for ai, are built cheaply so there is no CRAC air conditioner nor any other air conditioners using refrigerant (direct expansion air conditioners) nor air or water cooled chillers. As air enters the building, it passes though electrostatic filters to remove dust, then through evaporative coolers which spray water to cool the air and then directly into the cold aisles in the data hall. Then The hot aisles are vented directly to the atmosphere through the roof. The server fans are very loud and can be heard outside.

AI datacenters are an entirely different beast than traditional "computers in a warehouse" datacenters.

It's like the difference between and idyllic family farm with a few chickens and pigs to a factory farm with thousands of pigs jammed under one roof.

This feels less like a data center problem and more like a basic failure to price and regulate industrial externalities...are crypto mining or ai compute socially useful? Up for debate, but what isn't is that neither should make a surrounding neighborhood unlivable.

Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound. Any facility like this should have to prove it can operate within a certain acousting footprint before it's built

Ah, the ol' "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" defense

It's so easy! Just think of every possible scenario and avenue that can be abused, and legislate it, in perpetuity.

> Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound

Maybe the regulations could be structured around a scaled integral of volume over time

You really just need the noise ordinance to have more teeth... instead of just a perpetual fine, you need to be able to shut them down if they continue to exceed the noise threshold.

I think that's a weird problem with law in general.

Corporations created by "incorporation", creating a "body" with all the rights of a human, are rarely treated with common sense punishments when they do wrong.

Humans do bad things, and they are not only fined, but forfeit rights, are segregated from others, put in jail, and sometimes executed.

A fine is perfectly adequate to address the problem, provided you're able to enforce it.

Each time a repeat offender offends, simply double the fine from their last offense. Repeat monthly until their insolvency, at which point you confiscate the building and sell it to someone willing to follow the law.

Perpetual fine bad. Escalating fine good.

If it's generating revenue from an international clientele, and paying local taxes, it's almost guaranteed to be socially useful, at least from the domestic standpoint.

Make John Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer of Hyperscale Data, live in one of those houses for a month. See how he likes the sound.

To be fair a large amount of the fault here lies with the city, who permitted a data center to be built in a residential neighborhood.

There are plenty of dirty, noisy, disruptive industrial buildings out there. Smelters, quarries, incinerators, etc.

Fine to build them. Don't build them next to houses, build them next to each other.

What it really comes down to is a political and legal environment that allows or even encourages grift at an industrial scale and has largely erased public accountability by turning everything into a divided political issue (and proletariat politics into a sort of “sports team” identity)

It’s genius in a malevolent way, and absolutely nullifies the democratic process in favor of corporate oligarchy.

If they're any thing like my city, the board members don't live anywhere near the areas they're granting permits for.

Every day, the gap between the news and The Onion gets a little smaller.

From 12 years ago

https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...

Also depends on what you were used to before. I live in a rural area and it can be annoying when a neighbor half a mile away is running a lawn mower.

In a downtown urban center there is so much noise from traffic, emergency vehicles, construction, and equipment of various types that a new data center would probably just blend in unnoticed.

The problem is the salvaged aviation turbines. Airplanes are prevented from operating at high power levels above cities. These engines-from-old-airplanes are likely being operated in their high efficiency range, around 80 percent, so they are loud. Living next to a runway loud.

Airplanes can't carry much in the way of sound supression or "mufflers" on engines. Running them on the ground, it should be straightforward to make them reasonably quiet.

The sheer volume of air moved by high pressure gas turbines makes that large and costly. Not impossible, but very large. These units are 2 per container size, intake and exhaust silencers would probably increase their footprint 5-8x. Not that it shouldn’t be done, just that there’s a lot of incentive not to do it.

And, surprisingly, dense urban buildings are pretty good at blocking sound. It's rare to hear a mower even one street over.

youtube video link from the article behind the "you must agree to cookies to play this youtube video embed that's actually not a youtube video embed" shenanigans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wDr2dec474

This reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas.

[1]: https://youtu.be/m7_WDzPyoqU

another link: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-noi...

This particular datacenter was retrofitted into an existing industrial building, there was some sort of industrial metalworking factory there previously. Structure dates to 1972.

The houses are basically right across the street from it. The noise does sound annoying as hell. This seems like a basic failure in local permitting/zoning to allow something this noisy without a significant empty buffer zone to any residences.

edit: it's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dowagiac,+MI+49047,+USA/@4...

wait, what was the sound from the industrial metalworking factory like?

It was likely quieter on average and likely not working during the night.

BTW, I grew up a few blocks away from a steel foundry, and it typically was emitting a low humming noise. It faded into the background and was not a problem. We could hear loud clangs from time to time, but not at night.

Presumably much less- the datacenter was apparently not that disruptive until they tore down the trees between it and the homes. The manufacturing facility may not have been 24/7 either

It likely didn't have the power requirements either. I'm just guessing here, but that sounds a lot like turbine whine. (I've heard them elsewhere, not to mention been around plenty of aircraft) My guess is that they brought one on site like they've done to other facilities to provide on-site power where the local grid isn't sufficient.

The pledge by their CEO to shut down crypto-mining equiptment feels like a deflection to me, because I don't think that's the source of the noise. It's the turbine generator, and switching to AI I don't think will change the power requirements any. We'll see I suppose.

If you watch the video, there used to be a line of trees that helped block the sound. Then those trees were ripped out to build a loading dock, and the building was converted to crypto miners.

I don't even know what to say to this because they never decided to replant the tress or create some other kind of buffer in its place. Just yanked the trees out and moved on. I'm not even an environmentalist, but this sort of nonsense really pisses me off.

These houses are directly across the street. It looks like the data center owner should have allotted some buffer land between the facility and the property line.

All that to mine crypto. What a waste of resources.

The most annoying part of this for me is that acoustic treatment is usually unbelievably effective if you make even the slightest attempt at applying it. A box lined with mineral wool is not exactly an expensive or complicated engineering solution.

I see this kind of ignorance everywhere. Rooms where people suffer all day every day that could be made 10x more comfortable with $50 of treatment and literally 30 minutes of labor. Same thinking applies to these hyperscalars. There are some frequency ranges that are more difficult to control (infrasonic), but those are not typically found in a datacenter site.

The salvaged aviation turbines are the majority of the issue. Non turbine-powered data centers mostly are reasonably quiet.

At a minimum the data center should be responsible for paying for noise mitigation on all houses within a half mile of the site.

That work could be done within a few months, upgrade all the window treatments, replace all doors with solid core, add sound mitigation fencing, etc.

The problem with noise is that it follows inverse square law. It is several orders of magnitude more efficient to simply abate the noise at the source.

Sweet foods turn into poison after a limit of intake. Science and technology products turn against humanity when they are produced in excess of the need. The blind belief that technological advances are desirable without limits - should stop.

what I want to know is why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere, catch all the heat and sell it to the few buildings with actual tenants, and as soon as the much less flamable sodium batteries come on at scale stack the rest of the empty buildings with those,and then run the whole mess from cheap solar

It's because you have a bunch of different unrelated "theys" in your one "they". There's no one person who can make a decision like that, and the risk and time inherent in trying to negotiate between all those parties is far, far worse than building new.

>why the fuck dont they put these data monstrocities in any number of thousands of empty giant office towers littering city centers everywhere

Big problem is providing enough electricity to an office tower.

A local company built a test T3 datacenter in an office building. Heaps of floorspace. But they cant get enough juice in, they started selling racks with less and less guaranteed supply. IIRC the site is basically forever capped at 2.5MW.

Whats worse is that the inner city location makes it an absolute favorite with telcos, but the telcos cant put their towering monstrous electricity sucking routers in for fear of browning the site (We tried, we were politely asked to leave).

I was walking past the construction of a new site just yesterday and they had the electrical switchboards on the pavement being prepped for being craned in through the open roof. Theres no way you would be able to easily retrofit for that sort of electrical supply.

Room temperature superconducting cables will be really nice, one day.

dont worry people of the first world, all the noise is going to move to the 3rd world in the next few years.

well i dont know why the downvote, this is exactly what happens to most toxic processes. exported out to the 3rd world.

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