Life next to 199 data centres
33 comments
·October 27, 2025lemonlime227
Ashburn/Loudoun resident here, lived right next to us-east-1 for 10+ years. No, the noise is not impactful. The data centers are very quiet on the outside. More noise comes from Dulles Airport nearby. Main problem is 1. visuals. They are horrendous blobs to look at. 2. land/electricity values. Gone up a lot in the past few years. Happy to answer any questions.
chinathrow
Your noise statement is one datapoint, there are others in the article. Who's right regarding the noise?
guywithahat
Well noise drops off following an inverse square law, so possibly everyone. Moving down just a couple houses can significantly cut down on noise pollution.
rdtsc
These things are ugly and take up a lot of space. They do have their fans which claim they do not generate that much traffic relative to their size since, they don't have that many people working there. For example, if they were replaced with the same sized office buildings, they'd probably put more strain on the road infrastructure and so on. Also, some of the property taxes collected from DC operators supposedly go to lowering the property taxes of residents in the county.
https://www.loudoun.gov/FAQ.aspx?QID=1793
> said, noting the humming or buzzing noise the centre emits scares away a lot of wildlife from his area
I imagine trees and fields that have been cleared and the roads paved probably play a good part too as well.
alyxya
It's sad seeing people impacted by these data centers considering how little voice they have. I don't think anyone wants to live near a data center unless they actually worked there.
SirFatty
I wonder how much property value is affected.
ta1243
And very few people work there relative to the impact. Sure nobody liked living near factories in ye olden days, but they did like the employment opportunities.
You can see how few work there when you compare the size of the data centre and the size of the car park.
axus
There's a lot of work building them, not permanent of course.
tomhallett
But there is an upside to this - you get the benefits of being a city with big business (tax revenue, donations to the local schools, investments in infrastructure), but don't have increased commuter traffic.
gowld
Then the locality government gives tax incentives so the residents don't get any benefit in exchange for their polluted environment.
dingnuts
Did you read the article? It's about Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the US. The people "affected" both are the ones making the decision about where to put the data centers and the ones profiting off them. Don't lose sleep.
Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave. This isn't mountaintop removal in coal country. This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.
The fact that there's even an article about it is evidence of the fact that the affected are wealthy. The article is their voice. The wealth that allows them to live in Loudoun County is their voice.
alyxya
I hadn't heard of Loudoun County before. I also did read the article and here's a sentence from it.
> But while most locals the BBC spoke to opposed the data centres, the industry has many powerful proponents, including US President Donald Trump.
Also moving isn't something to take lightly.
> "I never thought that a data centre would be built across the street from my house," she said. "I would not have bought this house if I had known what was going in across the street."
dylan604
> "I never thought that a data centre would be built across the street from my house," she said. "I would not have bought this house if I had known what was going in across the street."
and let this be a lesson to anyone looking to buy with vacant land within whatever radius you want to apply. if you think you might be upset by something that could be developed in the future, you can do some basic research on what zoning the lot(s) have, if they are owned by someone/thing that is discernible and not a shell company (if it is a shell company that's probably an indication you won't like what's coming), etc. sure, the ultimate developer of the think you won't like might only purchase the lot just before they are ready to build (specifically to avoid this), ultimately they will have to file for plans. it's possible those plans have already been filed, but if you don't look into it, it's really on you since you have the problem with it.
jasonthorsness
Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right? What would be the reason it would go beyond like any HVAC-ish thing on a large building? Lost me at the first sentence :(
nyrikki
Due to rising power densities, and constrained power and costs of that power, modern data centers tend to use free air cooling vs the older always compressor cooling. When the temperatures are right they basically just use fans to bring outside air in, which is much much louder because you have to move a lot of it.
It goes way beyond normal building HVAC levels, AI has pushed many DC's from 8 kW to 17 kW a rack in just a few years.
IIRC the average medium office building pulls about 22 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square foot of floorspace per year. So their cooling needs are tiny.
throw0101c
> It goes way beyond normal building HVAC levels, AI has pushed many DC's from 8 kW to 17 kW a rack in just a few years.
17 kW per rack for AI/ML HPC was workable >5 years ago. If you're not budgeting for double or triple that number nowadays you're not capacity planning properly.
NoiseBert69
I live close to a hospital and they make a generator test run once a month. That's an ultra deep sinus (~30Hz) that's humming along - you can hear it everywhere within the city.
It's was super easy to measure using a Sensirion Differential Pressure sensor. They have a few extremely sensitive models that have a 100Hz sampling rate (50Hz useable after Nyquist) - also: you can sense washing machines (from vibrating buildings) with it 2 blocks away.
kraftman
I worked in a medium data center and there was no noise outside, no noise from the office in the same building, no noise outside the airlock, very loud inside. Maybe huge datacenters are very different somehow?
xnx
> I worked in a medium data center and there was no noise outside
AI datacenters have much larger cooling needs and often use generators
DontBreakAlex
I once visited a fairly large DC in the outskirts of paris (Scaleway DC5) and it was basically dead silent outside. I guess these large DCs are just build with absolutely no concern for noise pollution?
tuetuopay
Scaleway DC5 is large by French standards, rather small by US hyperscaler standards. But the main reason is DC5 does not use classic cooling, thus does not have huge dry coolers outside, which definitely helps for noise (it's adiabatic cooling).
Another fact is just the sheer power density of those problematic north virginia datacenters. I'd bet us-east-1 is not an issue (old building and lower power density), but the newer AI ones are. Just take a look at how much AI clusters eat: a single DGX H200 box with 8 GPUs is 10kW. Most facilities provide 10kW for a whole rack, not 8Us. You're looking at 60kW racks, which is a mental power density: a single aisle trivially gets over the MW threshold. You used to feed rooms with megawatts. Heck, DC5 has 24MW of power, that's only 20000 H200 (again, think hyperscaler scale).
Still about cooling, the load profile is even different. DC5 is a general purpose datacenter, where the load is not full blast. Your AI datacenter has the GPU clusters full blast all the time. That's a LOT of power.
I happen to know pretty well the Scaleway infra and visited others of their datacenters. You can stand centimeters from the noise-dampening wall surrounding the dry coolers and not hear a thing; while almost needing noise protection within the wall.
zamadatix
Scale; comparing DC cooling to a large building's is like comparing street noise in a suburb to a highway.
It'd be nice to have some hard data on it though. Sometimes the hum is "god damn, that is annoying!" and other times it's someone saying "20 miles that way they built a DC and now it makes the cell phone tower effects twice as bad in this area" when reality was it doesn't show up as audible a half mile away.
mrweasel
I have never visited datacenters that large, but transformer substations can have an audible hum to them. Tests of diesel generators can also produce a bit of noise.
I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws that prevents datacenters from being built where people live. When we built a fairly small datacenter we had to place it in an industrial area with no housing and no offices.
dylan604
> I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws
If that's surprising, you should look into how infamous the city of Houston's lack of zoning laws has made it.
SirFatty
If got past the first sentence, you might learn the answer to the question. Substations and power/peaker plants. Maybe not in all cases, but I wouldn't want to live next a building have has row upon row of AC systems running 24 hours a day.
jeron
I already live and sleep next to my homelab, which is probably louder than those power plants
whooooosh
You can look on youtube for any number of videos showing you what it sounds like to be near one of these centers.
For example,
webdevver
god forbid someone builds something. it is very fitting that a british newspaper would be so repulsed by the prospect of industry.
FridayoLeary
It is a human interest story so it focused on that angle. I think most people can recognise that having these data centres on US soil outweighs the quality of life concerns of the local residents. NIMBYism holds back a lot of infrastructure in the UK, that does get discussed a lot here.
> "Northern Virginia was really at the centre for the growth of the internet, [it was] where AOL was headquartered, and so naturally they have the talent, they have the people already there, it was just easier to make [the data centres] there," cybersecurity expert Thomas Hyslip said.
Relevant Wikipedia entry-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
“Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.[3]”
I love how this sentence is written like some sci-fi premise. The source is much more clinical about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20050214071013/http://www.wolfso...
“The décor of the machine room is unmarred by ornament. The room was created by walling off an area of the underground parking garage of a suburban Virginia office tower. The ceiling is low; harsh light pours out of fluorescent tubes; the air is filled with the white noise of a hundred computer cooling fans and a hint of battery fumes. Standing in this crowded space, surrounded by hard-working and very slightly grungy machinery, gives an interesting perspective and sense of scale, which is exactly what I was looking for in coming here. The room is no bigger than a two-car garage, and yet by some estimates more than half the traffic on the Internet passes through here.”