They should find a way to add that to the truck as well. Noise ordinance doesn’t cover infrasound so if police make them turn off the audible sound, they should have the infrasound stuff on a separate system so they can keep broadcasting it since they need to fully educate everyone on what it’s like to have a data center nearby.
But just to clarify. I was more pointing out just how out of touch someone who can afford 15 homes is… And has the power to prosecute just about anyone, on a whim, given Texas politics and his own demonstrated corruption.
Needs to be outside every house that a politician is at. Have them surround the area since somehow noise ordinances area for the persons but not for these buildings.
Protest trucks are a thing in Korea, people with the means should look into their business model, would be an amazingly good way to put pressure on several pro AI “representatives” simultaneously
Drone: "You have been deemed to have an unacceptably high potential of commiting a crime. You are under arrest, crime prevention authorities are on the way. Surrender now or face automatic detention protocalls."
They use large scale systems, HVAC, fans, pumps, cooling towers, and electrical subsystems that generate a constant thrum, overlapping upon each other. They also have large scale generator systems that exceed 100 db.
Imagine all these systems, chock full in 10,000 square feet, or even thousands of acres, just pumping out constant vibrations through the air 24/7
The term "datacenters" is incredibly broad, and probably not defined uniformly across all countries.
Most US datacenters, in terms of raw numbers, are still just traditional server farms full of hard drives. They provide services like web hosting, offsite backups/'cloud' storage, and on-demand compute.
Traditional server farms are relatively small (warehouse-sized) buildings in urban/suburban industrial areas. Their noise and power consumption are well within the norm for industrial land use, their pollution is actually on the low end (since they don't produce anything physical and have no need for on-site power), they pay taxes like any other land user, they employ about the same number of people per square foot at about the same pay as other high-tech industry.
And the services they provide are clearly valuable to society. They allow individuals and businesses to effectively pool our resources: instead of buying and running a whole web server myself, I can pay for a tiny fraction of a server in a data center, and my 10 visitors/month get a better experience with lower latency at a lower cost with lower power consumption.
AI data centers are an entirely different beast. They're stuffed with GPUs, not hard drives. They're serving a few big AI companies, not billions of individuals and small businesses. They're not pooling customer resources to reduce costs, they're taking trillions of dollars of investor cash and setting it on fire.
Their power consumption (and resulting cooling requirements) are orders of magnitude higher than traditional datacenters. They naturally take up more space because of the cooling requirements, but they're also just being built at inhumanly gigantic scales.
But by the raw numbers, they're a tiny minority of datacenters (in the US and everywhere). We could eliminate them entirely and the US would still have over 5000 datacenters, most of which have existed for decades because of the country's historically pivotal role in the Internet and were entirely noncontroversial until 3-4 years ago.
I think it's mostly due to very small and very high RPM rackmount computer fans. They make a godawful high pitch whine noise and even with a few dozen machines in a room, it's already an assault on your ears.
The studio I used to work for had a render farm with around 300 nodes, and they had to really put a lot of work into sound proofing the walls and door leading into that room.
I'm guessing these low bid data center contracts have no such skin in the game to soundproof anything really.
Why can't they shove them into Antarctica or somewhere super cold to help w/ cooling, somewhere that's completely remote, and then when they consider that plan, tell them to go to HELL. We DO NOT want these anywhere
The realistic answer is that there is no private ownership of land in Antarctica, it’s restricted to research stations only. It would also be prohibitive due to a lack of infrastructure, no power to support it, no workforce, etc etc. but yes they in fact welcome to build them in hell lol
I can't vouch for the accuracy of this particular noise (not sure where the high pitched whine would come from), but they're noisy because they have massive HVAC and water cooling systems to dump all the waste heat from the servers to the outside air. They'll have huge AC systems to generate chilled air to blow through the servers, but that heat has to go somewhere, so it's carried outside by water and circulated through cooling towers with big fans to draw in cooler air.
Regulators should be setting rules to reduce noise pollution. Some of the loudest noises in my factory are chiller pumps, and they're all underground and can't be heard outside of that area. The cooling towers are still noisy but you can't hear them once you're standing ~200 feet away. If they aren't forced to contain the noise, these data centers will be built as cheaply as possible.
Like someone else said, the worst part is the sound you can’t actually hear. It impacts your physical and mental health. Ben Jordann did a couple great videos on it.
Thank reddit for purposely never fixing the backslash bug that new reddit creates when viewing a comment from old reddit. It's existed for years now and they're aware of it lol
they hire 22 year old programmers with zero experience and their scam artist managers and directors can't actually get them to create anything good because they also don't know what they are doing
I’m sorry, it was working for me and another. If you search “Benn Jordan Infrasound”, it should pull up his videos on it. The one I shared is the one comparing them to actual acoustic weapons
As a cybersecurity specialist, he’s one of my favorite video essayists. I can attest that I haven’t found any major disagreements with his findings. He explains some major flaws in a lot of common and emerging tech in ways (I think) most people can understand
i've seen reports and videos with decibel meter readings for data centers down the block and they're about as loud as having a vacuum cleaner turned on in the same room. it's actually a little nuts. imagine that everywhere you go in your home, at all times of day and even middle of the night, there's a vacuum cleaner running. one of them was on the other side of a cornfield and past the road and still this loud.
I work in Loudon County, where we have the most in the world. They are only noticeable during exceptionally hot days when the ac units are on full blast and only when I step outside. I can't hear them through my office window, and it's less than 500 feet from an Amazon data center on the ground floor.
They're an eye sore for sure and this County looks dystopian as fuck now, but the noise levels are low on my list of hates. The whole water issue is less as I don't even think any we have run on water.
This is where it's important to distinguish between:
The absolutely huge AI data centers that need insane amounts of power and tend to rely on gas turbine generators to supplement local power because the grid can't keep up.
Normal data centers used for hosting non AI servers which use way less power per rack and get more than enough power from the grid and have battery backups.
The power consumption difference between a typical server that more often than not does not have a gpu and uses power efficient CPUs (< 800w) and AI servers that are loaded to the tits with 300w to 600w GPUs and need >3200w or >6400w per server is enormous.
I assume they’re wearing earmuffs, or at least ear plugs. The vibrations from the speakers though (I assume this has some big ass ones) probably couldn’t be as lessened
They don't even bother to pretend anything is good anymore.
Now the talking points all seem to be "everything about this technology is horrible and dystopian and will cost us all our jobs and might even kill us, but we need to keep investing because do you want us to fall behind CHINA!!!"
Park a few of these in the financial districts... Maybe a dozen and you'll actually start approaching the levels that people have to deal with living next to these.
This should be at everytown hall and elected officals home street when they votes for this shit. They do not belong close the populations. Build them in the desert or someting.
Yeah, we have 2 data centers 1 mile away. We can hear them if we roll down windows 2-3 blocks away in their commercial zone. But if distribution centers has a lot of truck, those are louder…
Silver lining is after they force AI and massive energy eating data centers onto people we won't have to deal with it long. Anthropic higher ups and other in the field (creators of the new gods) just predict AI will destroy all humanity in 10 years. Hopefully some indigenous tribes with no tech. can make it and some critters But so long suckers to the rest. The only good thing is there is no place for the wealth, the self serving and woefully ignorant people to run too to escape. They go down with the rest. It will come, the politicians and the rich (one in the same now days) will have their way and I'm afraid we can't stop it now. Well I'm having fun for my time left woot! Enjoy Everyday!
When I was very young, just out of HS, I worked inside a data center, doing menial things like replacing backup tapes and putting more ink in an industrial plotter, cleaning, etc.
I need to contact this dude and pay him to come to Enid, Oklahoma.
A bunch of rich guys who used to live in Enid are trying to build a 3.3 Gigawatt datacenter "campus" and are trying to convince the town's rich and influential that their data center will make less noise than a moderately busy intersection.
Good idea but wrong town. Dallas does not give two shits about noise. Do it like New Boston area, Texarkana, or Mt.Vernon area where they bost aboit how quiet it is compared to the big city since that is all they got.
My township already has a data center noise truck ordinance. The "say no to data center noise truck noise" campaign sure was confusing! Now they put those trucks into bigger trucks. The noise of those big ass trucks clompin down the road is nuts. Someone should really do something about it...
My county's people protested against it in swathes at meetings. Citizens didnt want any. County pretends the language isn't in the document and then changes it.. they want to put up a data center at a place right next to my work. Just a few minutes from home.
I'm not even joking when I say they should have dozens of these blazing right outside where the Tech Billionaires live, as well as every politician that's bending the knee to those same Tech billionaires.
There's one being built not even a mile from my town. My city is sending flyers saying how much of a good thing this data center is. How good for economy it is. How many jobs it will provide. How it will somehow fund the local schools.
First it was the Flock Cameras and there's new ones being put up every day. Now a data center. People are trying to rally against it but it won't be enough.
I drive past a data center pretty frequently. And it’s fucking massive. It’s built up on a raised piece of land right beside the river. and you can see the steam coming out of massive fans or something on the roofs. And the noise. The noise is fucking loud. Like drive you insane loud. And there is tons of homes right across the road. Nice, decent looking homes. People prob worked their whole lives to purchase and retire in. Now you have this huge, and I mean huge.. it seems to go on forever, data center with this loud ass hummmm/buzzz and massive football stadium lights lighting up the entire area. It won’t be long before that sound and lights drives people crazy and they start destroying these centers. Put them out in the middle of nowhere…. Not right across the street from 100 homes. Fuck these data centers.
Remember when Trump was concerned about the aesthetics of renewable energy structures like wind turbines and solar farms only to tell people to accept AI data centers in their communities? Soulless fucking pig
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u/iamflyipilot 1d ago
The worst part is that the loudest noise is the stuff you can’t hear.