Do you know what makes a lot of noise? Airports. Trains. Cars. Factories. The AC Unit on your own fucking house.
We build and operate all of those, even in residential areas.
Datacenters are not unique, not even the big ones. The noise they put out usually doesn’t travel more than a couple of thousand feet, and the biggest “mall” sized data centers are not being built within a couple of thousand feet of houses.
Hilariously, some of the largest datacenters like the ones Google has in Ohio had no significant noise complaints until AI noise complaints hit the news. …newalbanyohio.org/resident-questions/
Over the course of more than 15 years of data center development, specifically, New Albany is only aware of four noise complaints from an operational data center – all of which were resolved within days. In September of 2025, the City received consistent feedback from residents near Google’s New Albany campus about noisy exhaust fans.
Because it’s BULLSHIT.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 2 days ago
These LLM datacenters aren’t your average datacenters. They’re not racks of mostly hard drives and cpus, they’re energy hog supercharged gpus that just vomit heat.
My single gpu PC can raise the temp of my office by like 10°. And it’s not even that impressive of a spec. The standard industrial sized cooling hasn’t cut it for these installations
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
You’re right that they use more power and generate more waste heat per square foot, however, they don’t build larger AC units for them they just use more total units. They are effectively limited in size based on transporting it to the site on a truck, and are the exact same units used in current data centers and other industries that need cooling like this.