It'd be nice to have some hard data on it though. Sometimes the hum is "god damn, that is annoying!" and other times it's someone saying "20 miles that way they built a DC and now it makes the cell phone tower effects twice as bad in this area" when reality was it doesn't show up as audible a half mile away.

I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws that prevents datacenters from being built where people live. When we built a fairly small datacenter we had to place it in an industrial area with no housing and no offices.

It's was super easy to measure using a Sensirion Differential Pressure sensor. They have a few extremely sensitive models that have a 100Hz sampling rate (50Hz useable after Nyquist) - also: you can sense washing machines (from vibrating buildings) with it 2 blocks away.

There's going to be variation based on how the data center is constructed.

The ones I've seen (which is certainly not all of them, so take it with a grain of salt) in the geographic area that this particular article is about are closed buildings that should be pretty well noise regulated individually, but that's not always the case -- some companies (like Marathon/MARA) have data centers using what are effectively open air designs that don't contain sound very well at all and can easily generate significant noise pollution around them.

And some companies (eg. xAI/grok) are a bit of a hybrid where the main part of the data center is enclosed but they park many loud methane turbines outside of the building for power and those make a lot of noise (and air pollutants).

The basic TL;DR is that it is possible to build data centers that aren't an absolute nuisance to the population around them, but there are plenty of data centers out there that don't meet that goal. And the more these companies try to scale up quickly to meet their perceived "AI" needs, the worse things are getting in terms of noise pollution, air pollution and competing for resources (like water and energy) with local residents, etc.

For example,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHPKPmoW910

It goes way beyond normal building HVAC levels, AI has pushed many DC's from 8 kW to 17 kW a rack in just a few years.

IIRC the average medium office building pulls about 22 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square foot of floorspace per year. So their cooling needs are tiny.

You can see how few work there when you compare the size of the data centre and the size of the car park.

Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave. This isn't mountaintop removal in coal country. This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.

The fact that there's even an article about it is evidence of the fact that the affected are wealthy. The article is their voice. The wealth that allows them to live in Loudoun County is their voice.

I think this is dangerously close to NIMBY territory. People who bought homes in the cheapest land possible in areas with ample available farmland are upset that someone else bought some other land.

It’s quite easy to avoid that if you aren’t just buying on pure dollars per square foot like so many suburban buyers seem to be doing.

When it comes to vibrant urban core you actually benefit by having a lot of different things nearby “in my backyard.” As an added bonus, businesses looking for cheap land for factories and data centers tend to stay away.

But if we live in the city we’ll be “on top of each other” and I won’t have a walk-in closet to store all my clothes I don’t wear, and I won’t have a garage to store the car that I’m required to own to get around because nothing is nearby me, and I need a shed for my lawn mower because I can’t just share with my neighbors and I need my own yard because the public park is too far away, etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

It just seems to me that in Virginia in the United States, the externalities of building a massive data centre in an existing residential zone are either not being considered or not being acted upon.

I'd hate it if a company built a massive data centre right next to where I sleep. Low noise pollution is vitally important to quality of life.

I'd like to live in a society that treated me fairly, and at least purchased my property off me before building the data centre.

By all means, build the infrastructure. But please look after your people. It's not that arduous to purchase a few properties in exchange for a massive amount of profit.