Ashburn has the infrastructure however. From what I'm reading, other places don't. So they bring in power on-site, and it seems to be much less regulated.
But yeah, the ones with the turbine generators are even louder and more shrill. The xAI DC in Memphis last year had thirty five portable gas turbine generators.
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.
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.
Yet somehow data centers that apparently make awful noises 24/7, local lawmakers are suspiciously unable to do anything about.
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.
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
Maybe the regulations could be structured around a scaled integral of volume over time
It's so easy! Just think of every possible scenario and avenue that can be abused, and legislate it, in perpetuity.
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.
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...
BTW, I grew up a few blocks away from a steel foundry, and it typically was emitting a low humming noise. It faded into the background and was not a problem. We could hear loud clangs from time to time, but not at night.
https://theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-...
Big problem is providing enough electricity to an office tower.
A local company built a test T3 datacenter in an office building. Heaps of floorspace. But they cant get enough juice in, they started selling racks with less and less guaranteed supply. IIRC the site is basically forever capped at 2.5MW.
Whats worse is that the inner city location makes it an absolute favorite with telcos, but the telcos cant put their towering monstrous electricity sucking routers in for fear of browning the site (We tried, we were politely asked to leave).
I was walking past the construction of a new site just yesterday and they had the electrical switchboards on the pavement being prepped for being craned in through the open roof. Theres no way you would be able to easily retrofit for that sort of electrical supply.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
The pledge by their CEO to shut down crypto-mining equiptment feels like a deflection to me, because I don't think that's the source of the noise. It's the turbine generator, and switching to AI I don't think will change the power requirements any. We'll see I suppose.