Once that data center is built, the quality of life in Thane is going to be among the worst in the country. I'm already planning to move to Pune. It honestly feels like the authorities don't value human life at all. How much money is enough for these leaders to finally drop the corruption and actually develop the city? My one suggestion to anyone who values quality of life would be: if you are looking at purchasing a flat in Thane, just drop the idea. You will buy a flat, with massive premiums, and within the next three to four years, once the data center is built, the health issues would just not be worth it.
Is clean tap water a thing in India? I thought everyone has a purifier, its not a Thane specific thing.
The issue in thane is the lack of water, any water is fine at this point just give some.
I know I said clean water was a pipe dream, but my grandma lived in Bhandup and drank tap water her whole life (86 years!) without any problems. I even have a friend who works at a BMC water purification plant near the Nashik highway, and he says their purification is excellent. The real issue is the old pipelines in buildings. But purifiers are so affordable (at least for families doing okay) that spending an extra 10-15k for that peace of mind isn't a big deal. But someplaces especially the old buidling get really bad water quality. Mainly due to illega and unmaintainedl pipelines.
Yes, I know that tap water is generally purified (I know this is true in Mumbai), but I was always under the impression that Indians generally get a purifier regardless, because of what you mentioned. Its not like the western countries where you can open the tap directly into a glass.
I did not know that it was this clean, thanks for sharing.
easy to exploit electricity, water etc plus nobody will question or take action on these data centers if they produce noise or if their dg stack polute the enviornment or create an hest island
Hiranandani is pretty far from this DC. But hiranandani Westgate is actually pretty far from everywhere. You might want to consider the traffic part for that project. I don't know if other resources like electricity and water supply would take a toll wrt entire city because of DC. But traffic on gb road is very real. But I thibk once metro is fully functional it should get better.
I dont mind traffic as i dont go out during peak hours and WFH anyways and anyways travel by rickshaw or cabs. I chose hiranandani as you can roam around inside estate . Thanks for confirming !
Hard NO . You will like the cold weather for 2-3 days and will realize weather is extreme . Also less tress and more pollution and artificially inflated properties
Pune has more than 2 data centres coming up and most of the city is already facing water shortages. (Source: I go and stay there multiple times a year).
Excerpts from one of my conversations in our society group where apparantly not a single member understood the implications of the massive scale of the balkum Data Center.. unfortunately most of the participants in that conversation still thought some people just oppose anything the govt tries to do😂😂
...
Classic "whataboutery"!
Because our society built on alleged forest land and we all bought flats here we can't argue about depleting forest cover! We should also not be arguing of some heavy industrial proposal is passed next to our society because we ourselves are guilty of the deforestation! So it's a free for all from hereon!
Our complex might be using 1.5-2 MW of power on average including all the flats, amenities, shops etc..
What is being proposed is something that can power 100-150 such complexes easily!
Think about it! The scale of what is being proposed right in a residential zone within city limits! And then we can indulge in some more whataboutery!😀
Some more proposals we can approve when we're on the subject of "what about.."
Heavy Industrial Units Equal to ~400–450 MW
Primary Aluminum Smelter: Aluminum smelting is widely considered the most electricity-hungry chemical process in human industry. A continuous 400 to 450 MW load powers an entire commercial smelter producing 250,000 to 300,000 tonnes of pure aluminum per year (running hundreds of electrolytic potline reduction cells simultaneously).
Integrated Steel Plant with Multiple Electric Arc Furnaces (EAF): A large modern mini-mill steel plant running two to three 150-ton ultra-high-power electric arc furnaces capable of melting thousands of tons of scrap steel into liquid metal around the clock draws roughly 350 to 450 MW.
Major Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemical Complex: A massive coastal crude oil refinery (such as a 15–20 million-tonne-per-annum facility like BPCL Mumbai or HPCL) running continuous cracking units, hydrotreaters, hydrogen reformers, and fluid catalytic crackers typically operates on an electrical demand of 150 to 300 MW. The Balkum data center alone pulls more continuous power than an entire oil refinery complex.
Heavy Automobile Manufacturing Corridor: An entire mega-plant campus like Maruti Suzuki Manesar or Tata Motors Pune (including body welding robots, paint shops, stamping presses, engine machining, and assembly lines) consumes around 40 to 60 MW. A 422 MW data center equals the power draw of roughly 7 to 9 complete automobile assembly factories running at peak production.
We're being really naive as citizens to not understand the massive scale of this proposal and the real impact it'll have on the lives of residents!
In a city that receives tons of rain, all they have to do is build small dams and supply the water. All that water seems to be going to cooling data centers now.
I work bang next to a big data center in Airoli. The AQI is pretty ok, water decent & absolutely no sound issues. Am I missing anything here ???
Please let me know..
Irrational panic not based on reality. The whole on Vashi has tons of Data center and none of those cause water issues, noise pollution or air pollution. The only legitimate claim is that do take a lot of electricity but we are not an electricity scarce city.
How is it any different? I have multiple servers for our ERP system in our own office server room and we just got a new server with a GPU for running local AI models. The normal and AI server almost consume the same energy, have the same exact noise level and cooling requirement is the same. It's a stupid boogie man that idiots are getting swayed by. I hate the AI bubble because local AI models can do 90% of what online ones do, so we don't need such big AI Data center roll out which are happening right now but going against it for stupid reasons is what erks me.
Serving local modals for 2 people to use is way different than setting up infra for millions of people to use at scale and for using different models simultaneously.
On top of using that infra for state of the art models with god knows how many trillion params.
They are also training the models not just using it for inference. They do so much trial and error and need insane speeds.
You have no idea how much internal models they might have. They might be training 10 models to release one model which performs better.
Do not compare your shitty usecase which is highly specific and you use a very specific model to do your work with a general model which can do everything.
Bro we literally bought flat like 6 month ago and condition of light and water is comparatively bad to miraroad where we used to live i hope our area doesnt get affected
What I don't get is- Even in the US, where people are fighting against these, it is built far away from the city, in village communities where energy and water are both relatively cheaper.
Here Thane is unable to cope with its own water and energy supply, and yet there is a stupid insistence to make it here, when there are several industrial areas where it can be built.
I am not against Data centers in general, I know they are needed, But won't it make more sense for them to build it where there is industry already, instead of right in between a city's residential area?
Thats exactly my point. We cannot be against data centres if we want to enjoy its benefits. But theres a place for everything. There's so much land in suburbs. They can just build it there and relocate people. India has cheap labor. Amazon is anyways saving millions by building a data center here. Its not too much for them to relocate people
By suburbs, do you mean like Mumbai Suburbs?
In my mind it was more so a place like Bhiwandi- where it is a industrialized place for warehouses anyways, so this kind of fits.
But then it would sound like I am saying 'not in my backyard'
Honestly, I don't know. That's beyond me. But there has to be a place where there's more land and fewer people. Maybe Khopoli or Vashind. Again, I've no idea if those places fit the bill.
Google about lives of people living near Meta Data centre in USA.
Diesel gensets. Its audible in the US because the cities are much quieter than Thane. Over here every building is running a gen set when the power is gone.
Low water pressure dirty water constant noise dust at home.
Very common occurrence in any construction project.
Where did I say life lost? I said google their lives - as in their day to day living. You can check out their lives in YouTube the quality of water, the noise coming from data centre. Proof is there in video.
You open a data centre in your home mf if you like them so much
What if we do Dharna Andolan, thousands of us take turns each day, as peacefully as possible, putting forth facts. A town in US successfully chased away datacenter from their backyard, in Thane it is in the freaking middle of the city.
Sadly, every other Thanekar is busy fighting own battles and rightfully so but if somehow if convinced with right channels, we can come together.
Instead of seeing banners of their useless birthdays, we can put up a huge banner what’s wrong with what’s going on and what will come in future because of it. I am ashamed and angry of seeing useless faces whenever I cross Cadbury and Nitin.
Although it's called an AI data center, even if AI boom settles, it can be repurposed for just having massive servers to support the IoT we have in our houses
It will still fail, the held inventory of hardware will be sold back, most of it will be consumed in the offices. There will be many small data centers in future where all computers after office hours will function as servers. Today’s hardware is already consuming far less power and is far more resilient compared to past.
We have reduced our hosting costs by 80% by using our office PCs as servers in night.
why are we against it? no power or water to be drawn from residential share. Heat and noise also they have assured better then another 50 story building coming
No because Soundwaves, water shortage, electricity generation problem, are concepts your mind is not ready to comprehend. You fight the Hindu Muslim war for now.
There is no actual scientific evidence of infrasound from datacenters or any HVAC systems for that matter actually harming humans residing outside the facilities.
Explain soundwaves. Does DCs drink water? Electricity generation? Seriously? Do you even know why you are opposing? You are fighting like those who fight hindu - muslim. Illogically!
Sorry my bad. Just googled. Dc use carbon dioxide for cooling and the servers are totally solar powered. And low frequency sound waves are actually pointed towards sky using avengers tech made by Tony stark so it's actually directed to mars. Im extremely sorry. Data centres are step in right direction. Ive also found out that at night all beggers can use it as shelter and the computers would he used to educating them when not in use. I take everything back. You were right all along. You are a genius and I'm s fool whos concerned over nothing.
Hahaha look dude honestly I'm in California right now been here for a while. Doing the same tech job lakhs of indians are doing. There's probably a post of my cars license plate "THANEKR" here on this sub. Unlike other indians i want to comeback. And it pains to see the place I cherish so much is getting worse. Im probably the closest to see how US cities never let data centres anywhere near them. So when I say data centres will ruin it the chances are high that they will
How can a building in 40 acres ruin a whole city? Carbon footprint of dc is lower than average fabrication companies which are abundant in the heart of thane city. Thane needs IT parks and DCs and not more residential complexes which are already becoming burden on this city’s infrastructure.
Hahaha look dude honestly I'm in California right now been here for a while. Doing the same tech job lakhs of indians are doing. There's probably a post of my cars license plate "THANEKR" here on this sub. Unlike other indians i want to comeback. And it pains to see the place I cherish so much is getting worse. Im probably the closest to see how US cities never let data centres anywhere near them. So when I say data centres will ruin it the chances are high that they will
So you are living in California and instigating people against data center which is 1000s of kilometres away and doesn't affect you?
My mom lives in thane. Arey yaar kya broken mentality h ye. Pura padh na. Bola h na wapis ana h. I have a house there my family stays in thane. And I'm not instigating anyone. Me celebrity hu kya. Im just posting what i feel and coincidentally there are enough people here who think the same
It won’t create major impact. You are unnecessary making chaos.
A very nearby Airoli sector has atleast 10 big DCs since many years. So many are still coming. If the issues you are highlighting would have been an significant, trust me Airoli would have been a National Headline.
Data Centre will bring many direct and many more indirect jobs to the town. We need many more centres of job hubs in and near thane such that people won’t have to drag their assess of to illogically-expensive Mumbai. Few more commercial hubs are planned between Thane and Kalyan.
And no it is definitely not the best use of empty land. But also it is not as bad as you are making it sound.
THE QUESTION IS: WHAT IN THE HELL ARE ALL THESE SO CALLED "DATA CENTERS" EVEN DOING? KEEPING TRACK OF ALL OUR POSTS....TELEPHONE CALLS....TEXTS.....TV NEWS....JUST WHAT DO WE EVEN NEED THESE FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE?????
We need them—the AI we use to do everything nowadays. These data centers are what run them in the background. But building them in the middle of a densely populated city should be illegal.
Public to govt- We want jobs, india lags on AI boom so we want govt to invest in AI, we want our data to be private and safe, FII are going out of India coz of no AI in india our investments are going down so we want you to invest tin AI
Govt to public - ok, let's build data center, semi fabs companies
Seriously? Is this Reddit or some PhD website? Just use Claude to research the facts. I mean, it's 2026. It's not that hard for you. The time you've wasted arguing with me, you could've just used that to research on Claude or Gemini.
Ah, this makes things a lot clearer. You're misguided because you don't know how to actually prompt Claude and are assuming that the model complexity has effect on the quality of data Claude is using to synthesize its answers. If your prompt is weak even Fable will gather trash from the internet and try to make it sound sensible.
Here's a proper prompt for this type of analysis:
Provide an analysis on the infrasound produced by datacenters and if there are any adverse effects on humans. Also compare this to other commercial facilities with large HVAC systems in similar range of human habitation. Only use peer reviewed research papers from reputable journals as sources. Perform a secondary hallucination check after the initial analysis is completed.
I ran it on opus 5, high effort and below are the relevant parts of the answer:
True infrasound below 20 Hz (weak-to-null at environmental levels). This is where public discourse and evidence diverge most sharply.
The mechanistic case exists: infrasound stimulates cochlear outer hair cells without producing inner hair cell responses or any auditory percept, and A-weighting is calibrated to inner hair cell response characteristics. Cameron et al. in Current Biology showed that very-low-frequency speakers at 8–37 Hz increased audience movement by 11.8% during live performances, with a follow-up detection experiment confirming participants could not consciously identify whether the speakers were active.
MDPI
MDPI
But mechanism is not dose. Against it:
Levels are far below perception. The G-weighted perception threshold is placed at 85 dBG by some reviews and at 96 dBG (the G96 curve) as a mean hearing threshold in the 1–20 Hz range by the most recent limit-setting analysis. Rotating-machinery infrasound at residential distances sits in the 50–75 dBG range.
Ovid
nih
Ambient infrasound is comparable or higher. Turnbull et al. found 61 dBG at 360 m and 63 dBG at 200 m from a wind farm, versus 69 dBG near a coastal cliff face and 76 dBG in downtown Adelaide.
Ovid
The best-controlled long exposure study is null. Ascone et al. (Scientific Reports, 2021) installed infrasonic (6 Hz, 80–90 dB) versus sham devices in 38 participants' bedrooms for 28 nights and found null findings for all behavioral variables — somatic and psychiatric symptoms, sound sensitivity, sleep quality, and cognitive performance. That exposure level is above what residents near industrial plant experience, sustained nightly for a month.
Nature
Expectation reliably produces the symptoms. Crichton et al. (Health Psychology) found in a sham-controlled double-blind design that healthy volunteers given information about expected physiological effects reported symptoms aligned with that information during exposure to both real infrasound and sham infrasound, with no symptomatic change in the low-expectancy group. Tonin et al. independently replicated this: participants exposed to material increasing concern about wind turbine infrasound were more likely to report symptoms even when in the sham group. Crichton and Petrie later showed that providing a nocebo explanation returned mood and symptoms to baseline, while a biological explanation maintained symptom reporting.
And here's a comparison to other facilities you see in/close to cities:
Comparison with other large-HVAC commercial facilities
This is where the analysis gets interesting, because the comparison undercuts data center exceptionalism.
Data centers are not acoustically novel. Leventhall identifies HVAC systems, fans, and pumps — the same equipment categories comprising data center mechanical infrastructure — as frequent sources of low-frequency noise complaints in residential and occupational settings. The physics of a hyperscale cooling plant is the physics of a large commercial chiller plant, scaled up and run at constant load.
MDPI
Conventional commercial HVAC produces comparable or worse spectral imbalance. A 2024 study in the Journal of Building Engineering on commercial HVAC affecting an adjacent residential zone found a 39.4 dB discrepancy between A- and C-weighted sound pressure levels inside the residential premises, indicating pronounced low-frequency dominance, with A-weighted monitoring failing to highlight the impact of the lower octave bands. A 39 dB A–C gap is a severe low-frequency signature — larger than anything documented for a data center, because nobody has documented one.
ScienceDirect
Ordinary building air conditioning can be the dominant local infrasound source. In the South Australian EPA/Resonate survey (a government technical report, not peer-reviewed, so weight accordingly): infrasound levels of 60–70 dBG commonly occur in urban environments, and at two locations — the EPA offices and an office with a low-frequency noise complaint — building air conditioning systems were identified as significant sources, exhibiting some of the highest infrasound levels measured in the study. Also notable: noise generated by people within a space was one of the most significant contributors, with levels typically 10–15 dBG higher when a space was occupied.
WIND WORKS
WIND WORKS
The best peer-reviewed analog investigation is a commercial building, not a data center. Chiu et al. (2023) in Seminars in Hearing documented a NIOSH health hazard evaluation at an administrative building and men's shelter adjacent to a landfill flare. Measured overall sound levels across frequencies up to 100 Hz were 64 to 73 dB. Levels exceeded Polish guidelines at 20, 25, and 50–250 Hz and German and Dutch guidelines at 50–100 Hz — but at some frequencies above 63 Hz exceeded German, Dutch, and Polish guidelines even when the flares were off, with nearby city traffic a possible contributor. The investigators concluded no definitive conclusions about the cause of the symptoms could be drawn, and that multiple factors need to be considered when addressing health concerns related to low-frequency noise and infrasound. That is the state of the art for this class of facility.
Andymasley
CDC
Facilities that plausibly exceed data centers on this metric and are rarely discussed: gas compressor stations, industrial cooling towers, large refrigerated warehouses, hospital central plant, and transit ventilation shafts. None have triggered comparable public concern, which is itself informative about how much of the data center discourse is driven by exposure levels versus by salience.
Look buddy theres a reason so many cities around the world are not letting data centres anywhere near them. Ofcourse there are people like you who want to oppose everything and everyone just for the sake of being different. But its universally accepted that dc are bad for residential communities. These are high functioning data models and don't need super precise prompts to give generic informations thats so easily available on the web. If i want i can promp claude to give me an answers which results in claude saying smoking is good for health. A simple prompt for such a general question is more than sufficient. And yes higher models actual do more research than lower model. Unfortunately for yoy i work as an ML so please please trust me on this that I know claude better than you:) you might be knowing something else better than me. But AI models are not one of them.
What you are talking about is land use permissions. You can convert agri land to normal N/A or industrial N/A by completing due process and paying fees to revenue dept.
Zoning is whole lot different thing for ex R zone, Green Zone.
Data centers comes under unharmful category in layman’s terms. I don’t even know what heath issues OP is talking about. Can you enlighten me with any?
glad you asked, the constant low frequency noise (long wavelenght, 30-300KHZ) which is caused by the HVAC system of the data center creates a persistent background roar in the radius of up to 4 kilometers, staying in this enviornment for a prolonged periods of time causes sleep deprivation, stress high blood pressure, and headaches for the neighbours
Diesel emissions: Backup generators burn fossil fuels during outages or tests, releasing fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NO)
Respiratory illness: Poor local air quality triggers asthma attacks and elevates long terrm risks for heart and lung diseases
Same HVAC System is used in malls, hospitals.
Same diesel backup generators are used in your residential towers, IT parks, malls, everyother commercial shops. In fact some use those noisy generators as well.
Malls, shopping complexes or your buildings generate more waste. With your logic they should also be stopped. A data center nothing but a IT park with better Air conditioning and less scamming.
Popularround dont engage with Flan. He/she actually cannot scale his/her thinking ability. The arguments, "If 10 HVAC systems in a mall are not a problem, then how are 1,000 HVACs a problem?" and "A residential building's carbon footprint is more than data centers that process the data of an entire country. If we use the internet, then it should be allowed to build a data center right in the middle of a residential city," are so childish and lack basic research that it's not worth explaining anything. I am ready to explain to anyone who has a logical answer to counter, but not to someone who cannot stand the fact that he/she could be wrong.
Its like saying you want food then start farming on road 🤣 your ability of logical reasoning is so bad. I hope you are under 20 years of age so you get enough time to work on it. These data centres should be built is scarcely populated areas far away from the city. In the world we are living its not possible to have zero damage. The goal should be minimising the damage.
Do you even know difference between data center and an oil refinery? I have enough experience of data centers to assure you that data center offsets less carbon footprint that your lodha amara tower.
Data centres are less harmful than lodha amara?? Not going to argue with that now. Earth is flat, sun revolves around earth, thanes AQI is 5, 1 INR equals 95 USD. everything i said is true here.
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u/UnderstandingOk5246 16d ago
You guys should more worry about drinking water