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.
Edit: I don't think it SHOULD be this way, but downvoting me doesn't change that, only organizing for changes does.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> these are largely crypto mining rigs making this 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.
Yet somehow data centers that apparently make awful noises 24/7, local lawmakers are suspiciously unable to do anything about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/bitcoin-mining-noise-driv...