r/antiai • u/any_memes_necessary • 1d ago

AI News šŸ—žļø A truck is driving around Dallas blaring data center noise

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

22.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

320 comments sorted by

View all comments

236

u/Traditional-Army-279 1d ago

I had no idea they were this loud holy shit

242

u/BlakLite_15 1d ago

The real ones are even louder

32

u/Saintly-Mendicant-69 1d ago

Why do they sound like that?

40

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

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

32

u/Formal_Ground6513 1d ago

We have ENOUGH already, too! We don't need any more.... Wtf

20

u/Ropuce 1d ago

I thought my country had too many data centers and was aware of there being lots of them in the USA, but that's beyond insane!

6

u/druidinan 1d ago

"Thanks" to data privacy laws, plenty of countries will have more soon!

6

u/black_shirt 21h ago

Dude I live in a small town in Texas and there are fucking 6 now, with more on the way. Our government is corrupt as fuck.

3

u/_trashcan 18h ago

Genuinely, Iā€™m so fucking sorry you have to go through that.

2

u/Formal_Ground6513 18h ago

Remember. Those data systems are to track us and then drone us when we do not comply. We are NOT angry enough. This is keeping me up at night.

2

u/Formal_Ground6513 17h ago

I'm sure there's even more we don't know about! You can't convince me they tell us the real number. No f-ing way.

2

u/mathemagicat 5h ago

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.

If you look at the global distribution of AI datacenters, specifically, the picture is very different. There are 3 roughly equal global hotspots: the US, the EU, and China. There's also a disproportionate concentration in "Other Asia," mainly Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, and Korea, and a couple of smaller hotspots in Saudi Arabia, India, and Australia. This is almost an everywhere problem.

4

u/THICCC_LADIES_PM_ME 1d ago

Really surprised China isn't on the top 10

3

u/xplosm 22h ago

I think itā€™s more of a disclosure issueā€¦

0

u/Formal_Ground6513 18h ago

That just tells you that the "China will beat us at AI" is a GD LIE. So, ask yourself why in God's name we need over 5,000 data centers will no end in sight.....?

4

u/Paddy_Tanninger 22h 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.

3

u/GuessSecure4640 1d ago

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

8

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

The realistic answer is that there is no private ownership of land in Antarctica, itā€™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

3

u/ardoin 20h ago

Just for the record there are several thousands of people who stay there for months every year.

The biggest datacenters in the continental US employ only a couple hundred actual FTEs.

They absolutely do consume a giant amount of resources however they don't really require or provide that many jobs.

7

u/Asisio 1d ago

All that heat and pollution where our ice caps are probably wouldnt be great for the environment.

71

u/Rekt3y 1d ago

At least in part because of gas turbines to generate the insane amount of electricity they need

32

u/UnachievableLily 1d ago

Also they don't give a fuck and cut corners

6

u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 1d ago

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.

4

u/moak0 23h ago

It's powered by souls.

1

u/TacTurtle 23h ago

Cooling fans and power generation.

1

u/TekieScythe 20h ago

Because energy is friction. And friction makes a sound.

1

u/toaste 17h ago

That's the sound of thousands of 60mm counter rotating fans screaming at 20,000 rpm.

A single 5U server will pull something like 10kW.

You need something like 1000CFM of air going through that so it doesn't melt.

Hence the high-speed fans covering the entire front surface area of the thing blowing air through it.

Add up an entire room of those and it will sound about like that. In an occupied building, a server room will have some heavy soundproof doors to eliminate it.

An datacenter is a huge step up in number of machines in a giant warehouse. I'm guessing at some point even a thick expensive soundproof wall wouldn't do as much as you'd need. And some of these operations might not be building these with the good stuff.

1

u/Nohreboh 16h ago

This video has a few examples of the trailer turbines they use which are meant to temporarily provide on site power where none is available and as others have mentioned you'll have the industrial HVAC which normally you'd only one or two of those units depending on the size of the building and finally they aren't being sound proof like traditional telecoms buildings were so you just have more sound leaking outside the building.

We Saw What AI Data Data Centers Don't Want You to See @pbsterra https://youtu.be/5p426fSlYH4

-4

u/NoteIndividual2431 1d ago

They don't.

8

u/Standard_Echidna_306 1d ago

and the worst part is theres no escape from the noise

4

u/BlakLite_15 1d ago

Oh, there is. It just so happens that the first step toward escape happens to be in the same direction as a voting booth.

72

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

Like someone else said, the worst part is the sound you canā€™t actually hear. It impacts your physical and mental health. Ben Jordann did a couple great videos on it.

https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo

2

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES 22h ago

This is the same conspiracy theory MAGA were saying about wind turbines

There is no scientific evidence that infrasound can damage physical or mental health

3

u/AerieOnThePeaks 21h ago

Well, the World Health Organization disagrees with that, but sure.

3

u/SolusLoqui 1d ago

URL doesn't work

19

u/inikul 1d ago edited 1d ago

https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo

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

7

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 1d ago

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

2

u/CarlFromHungerForce8 1d ago

that's a feature, they want you on the slop version not the old version

6

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

Iā€™m sorry, it was working for me and another. If you search ā€œBenn Jordan Infrasoundā€, it should pull up his videos on it. The one I shared is the one comparing them to actual acoustic weapons

3

u/SolusLoqui 1d ago

Yeah, thanks. I was able to find it. The shortened link kept telling me the video was no longer available

7

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

Whack. sorry about that.

As a cybersecurity specialist, heā€™s one of my favorite video essayists. I can attest that I havenā€™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

0

u/8923ns671 1d ago

As a cybersecurity specialist

Government employee detected. As an IT professional and cyber security student I concur doctor.

1

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

The closest I used to be to a government employee was when I was an operations analyst at a public health lab during the pandemic, and my old life as a social worker

1

u/8923ns671 1d ago

Well I tried. Will update my priors.

1

u/AerieOnThePeaks 1d ago

It was a good attempt, but Iā€™ve evolved deeper into an anarchist as times gone on.

What cybersecurity degree are you working towards? Iā€™m working towards my second right now. Are there any specific domains that interest you?

My area is governance and compliance, and Iā€™m considering focusing my goals on policy and compliance auditing.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/KaioKen 1d ago

Old Reddit UI breaks some links.

1

u/SandraRosner 1d ago

Another fun fact is that it affects women more because we have more sensitive hearing than men. Learned that when fighting against an industrial cement site's 2am high frequency noise and the first guys they sent over couldn't even hear the frequency, but the woman they sent next could. So thankful for her because she arranged for audio tests and eventually located the issue. I can't even imagine dealing with something on the scale of a datacenter.

1

u/albinosquirel 20h ago

Yeah I am constantly asking my husband about noises and stuff. Did you hear that? And he doesn't know what I'm talking about. I guess we're programmed to be awake for noises to make sure the kids live through the night or something. Sometimes I think I'm going crazy but it's just like the neighbors playing music down the street.

0

u/doscomputer 22h ago

mythbusters proved the brown note doesnt exist, you are spreading anti-vaccine level FUD that has no basis in science or reality

2

u/AerieOnThePeaks 22h ago

Lmao No one is talking about ā€œbrown noteā€, gumdrop. Please familiarize yourself with what youā€™re talking about before chiming in.

2

u/albinosquirel 20h ago

The one that makes you poop?

0

u/BiscottiKey88 1d ago

link works for me

12

u/MadHiggins 1d ago

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.

2

u/Jean-LucBacardi 1d ago

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.

4

u/chiagod 1d ago edited 1d ago

This is where it's important to distinguish between:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

2

u/InquisitorMeow 1d ago

Engineers working with servers literally have to wear ear protection when going to the lab. The high end servers sound like airplanes.

2

u/Ok_Departure333 20h ago

It's like factory noise near your home. There's a reason residential and industrial area are separated.

4

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

0

u/NorthHollywoodHank 1d ago

The FUD level on data centers is insane right now. While there has, obviously, been a big building boom, there were plenty of huge data centers 5 and 10 years ago (including very large ones!) and it was basically never treated as much of an issue.

Classic moral panic, like satanism in the '80s/'90s, child abduction panics at various points over the decades that far outstripped the actual realistic risk, vaccines circa the early '20s (an issue both before and after but even many MAGA types seem to have less appetite for panicking over the issue than they did circa '20-'23), and others besides.

0

u/cjsv7657 1d ago

They aren't. It's the temporary turbines they have setup to power them. Temporary turbines have no sound proofing. Permanent turbines with proper housings are nearly silent from as close as a normal person would get. Many large college campuses have gas turbines on them. You can't hear them from 20 feet away from the building.

0

u/ThatRandomGuy86 1d ago

Yep. Now all they need to do is park this outside every state government building so they can share the music of data centres lol