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- Hacker News
- Sweet foods turn into poison after a limit of intake. Science and technology products turn against humanity when they are produced in excess of the need. The blind belief that technological advances are desirable without limits - should stop.by zkmon
- The most annoying part of this for me is that acoustic treatment is usually unbelievably effective if you make even the slightest attempt at applying it. A box lined with mineral wool is not exactly an expensive or complicated engineering solution.
I see this kind of ignorance everywhere. Rooms where people suffer all day every day that could be made 10x more comfortable with $50 of treatment and literally 30 minutes of labor. Same thinking applies to these hyperscalars. There are some frequency ranges that are more difficult to control (infrasonic), but those are not typically found in a datacenter site.
by bob1029 - The salvaged aviation turbines are the majority of the issue. Non turbine-powered data centers mostly are reasonably quiet.by K0balt
- At a minimum the data center should be responsible for paying for noise mitigation on all houses within a half mile of the site.
That work could be done within a few months, upgrade all the window treatments, replace all doors with solid core, add sound mitigation fencing, etc.
- All that to mine crypto. What a waste of resources.by bdavbdav
- These houses are directly across the street. It looks like the data center owner should have allotted some buffer land between the facility and the property line.by ETH_start
- another link: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/data-center-noi...
This particular datacenter was retrofitted into an existing industrial building, there was some sort of industrial metalworking factory there previously. Structure dates to 1972.
The houses are basically right across the street from it. The noise does sound annoying as hell. This seems like a basic failure in local permitting/zoning to allow something this noisy without a significant empty buffer zone to any residences.
edit: it's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dowagiac,+MI+49047,+USA/@4...
by walrus01 - wait, what was the sound from the industrial metalworking factory like?by NAR8789
- If you watch the video, there used to be a line of trees that helped block the sound. Then those trees were ripped out to build a loading dock, and the building was converted to crypto miners.by cortesoft
- This reminds of a video[1] from More Perfect Union about another (the same?) crypto mining facility in Texas.by Levitating
- youtube video link from the article behind the "you must agree to cookies to play this youtube video embed that's actually not a youtube video embed" shenanigansby dijksterhuis
- Also depends on what you were used to before. I live in a rural area and it can be annoying when a neighbor half a mile away is running a lawn mower.
In a downtown urban center there is so much noise from traffic, emergency vehicles, construction, and equipment of various types that a new data center would probably just blend in unnoticed.
by SoftTalker - And, surprisingly, dense urban buildings are pretty good at blocking sound. It's rare to hear a mower even one street over.by xnx
- The problem is the salvaged aviation turbines. Airplanes are prevented from operating at high power levels above cities. These engines-from-old-airplanes are likely being operated in their high efficiency range, around 80 percent, so they are loud. Living next to a runway loud.by K0balt
- Every day, the gap between the news and The Onion gets a little smaller.by soupspaces
- From 12 years ago
https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...
by walrus01 - Make John Stewart, Chief Marketing Officer of Hyperscale Data, live in one of those houses for a month. See how he likes the sound.by guessmyname
- To be fair a large amount of the fault here lies with the city, who permitted a data center to be built in a residential neighborhood.
There are plenty of dirty, noisy, disruptive industrial buildings out there. Smelters, quarries, incinerators, etc.
Fine to build them. Don't build them next to houses, build them next to each other.
- This feels less like a data center problem and more like a basic failure to price and regulate industrial externalities...are crypto mining or ai compute socially useful? Up for debate, but what isn't is that neither should make a surrounding neighborhood unlivable.
Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound. Any facility like this should have to prove it can operate within a certain acousting footprint before it's built
by luk212 - If it's generating revenue from an international clientele, and paying local taxes, it's almost guaranteed to be socially useful, at least from the domestic standpoint.by ETH_start
- > Also, noise regulations aren't good for this kind of constant tonal sound
Maybe the regulations could be structured around a scaled integral of volume over time
- Ah, the ol' "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself" defense
It's so easy! Just think of every possible scenario and avenue that can be abused, and legislate it, in perpetuity.
by ares623 - You really just need the noise ordinance to have more teeth... instead of just a perpetual fine, you need to be able to shut them down if they continue to exceed the noise threshold.by cortesoft
- Can someone explain why the new crop of datacenters are considered to be noisy?. I've been around the Wall Street datacenters in Jersey and they are basically the same as nondescript office buildings surrounded by a fence. The ones running on generators 24/7 are a problem but what is making the rest such an issue?
- Over time, improvements have been made in compute density, because more compute density means more money.
Higher compute density means higher thermal density, which means more powerful cooling is needed.
Server cooling solutions follow a management triple constraint: cheap, effective, quiet, pick up to 2.
Because loudness does not incur additional costs (due to negative externalities), "quiet" is the point of the triangle which gets most often sacrificed.
- I think in this case it's HVAC?by winrid
- AI datacenters are an entirely different beast than traditional "computers in a warehouse" datacenters.
It's like the difference between and idyllic family farm with a few chickens and pigs to a factory farm with thousands of pigs jammed under one roof.
by xnx - Datacenters are fine, its gas turbines making the noise.
Whats crazy tho is people repeating this as if its true of all datacenters.
Whats even crazier is fringe australian politicians WHO LIVE NEAR DATA CENTERS importing this and claiming all datacenters in australia are noisy (because some terminally online seps were complaining about it) without so much as going down to their local and testing the hypothesis.
by protocolture - A lot of hyperscale data centers, often built for ai, are built cheaply so there is no CRAC air conditioner nor any other air conditioners using refrigerant (direct expansion air conditioners) nor air or water cooled chillers. As air enters the building, it passes though electrostatic filters to remove dust, then through evaporative coolers which spray water to cool the air and then directly into the cold aisles in the data hall. Then The hot aisles are vented directly to the atmosphere through the roof. The server fans are very loud and can be heard outside.by alightsoul
- Edit: the noise at many of these DCs are also "portable" natural gas turbines, intended for use as emergency power or temporary power at large events. But companies like xAI are using them to back-door build large power plants. xAI's memphis DC has 30+ turbines running non-stop and xAI never filed any paperwork or received any permits related to them.
AI DCs use enormous amounts of power (and thus generate enormous amounts of heat) compared to "traditional" DCs. We're talking hundreds of megawatts, sometimes gigawatts. 1GW DCs have been popping up already.
OpenAI is planning a 10GW facility in Ohio that will need its own natural gas power plant. A 10GW natural gas power plant is massive. Currently the largest NG combined-cycle power plant in the US is about 3-4GW and comprises several combined units. Typical size of a NG plant is more like 500MW.
To put that into scale: a very large Manhattan skyscraper is in the 10-20MW range, so OpenAI is planning to use as much electricity as, well, all of Manhattan's skyscrapers and then some.
Since NG turbines are at best 60% efficient, the plant itself will generate ~6 GW worth of waste heat (remember: combined cycle, so they've already extracted as much heat as they can for power.)
10GW of heat is the same amount of energy as the amount of heat from solar radiation hitting roughly 10 square miles of the earth's surface.
It's also the difference between evaporative coolers which don't need as high static pressure, and dry coolers which need to force air through more dense air-liquid heat exchangers and also have to move more air.
Where people have pushed back on water consumption, rates have been raised (water deparments are increasingly going to nonlinear billing scales which charge people more per unit when they use more) or water just isn't available - datacenter operators have had to switch to "dry" cooling where coolant or refrigerant passes through a giant radiator.
Much less effective than evaporation. So you need to move a lot more air, and it also has to be done through a radiator, which probably has higher static pressure than an evaporative cooling tower.
by KennyBlanken