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> Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.

> “However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote

Absolutely no abnormalities because this is by design, but nobody wanted to pay attention when approving the building and zoning. Amazing what some money to politicians will get you.

I can't even imaging living within ear shot of these things. Horrific quality of life. I can't sleep when my water pump is active.

> Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.

Well then why were they allowed to vote on it ? It's incompetance ? Or just straight up corruption.

It's getting difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and corruption, as widespread as both of them are, and how their consequences always overlap.

One of the ways corruption hides its intentions is lying to make it look like incompetence. It takes a very long time for the truth to come out and it rarely does but corruption depends on people buying the lies and assuming its just incompetence.

Incompetence should carry liability as well. If some politician signs his name to random documents without understanding what he's doing and causes harm to people, he should simply pay the price to make the other party whole, whatever damage was caused should be undone to the fullest possible extent and he should be removed from office for good measure because he's clearly too dumb to exercise it responsibly.

That's the benign case. If it turns out he wasn't actually incompetent but was signing things in exchange for money or favors he should go to literal death row. Proven corruption should result in the death penalty for all involved.

A consequence on our focus on legislation rather than the more natural legal apths of addressing these problems, e.g. easements and tort law.

Or they don't see the problem. Someone's paying 600-900k to live in a townhouse 1000 ft from the runways at Dulles Airport

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/?category=SEMANTIC&sea...

Reminds me of former Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner’s suggestion that deaf people buy homes near the airport.

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19941105/1939991/oh...

My wife and I travel in our RV a lot and used to full time. Some RV parks - even when full - are often totally quiet and peaceful at least enough to not notice a slight background noise of cars driving around here and there.

Then a family will arrive that seems like they're at a Disney theme park and you just hear screaming kids non-stop. It's like a tornado is hitting for days. We always joke if you ask a tornado if it's quiet it will answer of course- I don't hear anything. Because there is NOTHING louder than the tornado and that's all it knows.

What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?

It also seems worth noting that these gas turbine generators are meant to be the solution to another big complaint people have about datacenters, that they might drive up local power prices if they plug into the grid. Like you and the people in the article, I'm personally very sensitive to noise pollution. so to me this sounds like another argument that datacenters should connect to the grid after all. But I'm sure some people disagree and think it's worth it to save on electricity, and others disagree and think there shouldn't be datacenters near them at all.

The local government has to resolve the disagreement somehow and no solution is going to make everyone happy.

> What do you mean, "allowed" to vote on it? The county officials are the decisionmakers, who should have allowed or not allowed them?

Well I'm not sure how it works there but there are requests here made before building can start. Planning permission is usually first voted on by committee and then brought to the public in the area and public forums are where people get to ask questions such as "what's the expected noise pollution". Basic stuff I thought.

The article details why it wasn't so basic here. Loudoun County allows datacenters to be built by right without a hearing, because they were understood to be (and IME still usually are) very low-impact on the neighbors. The gas turbines were approved as a temporary power source, but then the local power company Dominion said "temporary" would have to last for years longer than planned. Now they're changing the rules for datacenter approvals to ensure that projects that might end up producing this kind of impact will get the scrutiny they need.

There's an assumption underlying what you said that datacenters are gonna get built one way or another. But these aren't sewage plants or power plants or desalination plants or whatever, they aren't particularly important for the quality of life of most people. We could just kinda... not build them? How about we don't let them get built most places so it becomes fairly expensive. Make it so expensive that only say 1/5 of the amount get built. The rich techbros still have their videogen toys and nobody deals with noise pollution. It's not cheap to generate a picture of trump riding a frog, ya know, but like everyone's lives are no different from how they are now.

Especially when we're talking about datacenters with onsite fossil fuel power generation.

I don't assume that! There's nothing wrong with a local government deciding that they just don't like big projects and won't approve any that aren't strictly necessary for the needs of local residents.

The flip side is that residents of a place where people want to do more business and make big investments will have a lot more economic opportunity, which is important to quality of life. So unless you're in an area where people feel they already have all the opportunity they need, figuring out how to get businesses investing in your community in some way is important. And datacenters are often more pleasant to have nearby than warehouses or manufacturing.

I mean, I'm fine with datacenters plugging into the grid, if they pay for it. I don't understand (and I mean feel free to explain it) this weird shit where a datacenter goes up and everybody's power bills start increasing. I have assumed that it's because the grid's facilities require upgrades to meet the new demand, but in the case of the "new demand" being "one structure consuming an assload of power" it feels incredibly shitty to lay that burden on the taxpayers.

Ideally, the revenue from the new customer would be enough to cover the upgrades, so long as the new customer makes an up-front committment (from which loans can be written) that makes their risk (of having to pay for the upgrades even if they shut down much sooner than expected) about equal to if they build out their own off-grid system. And then they could sell to existing customers for slightly less than before, due to scale and an overall reduction of peak-to-baseline ratio.

But I guess this isn't how the world works.

A lot of the increase in bills people are seeing come from necessary upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. Something that was going to be happening anyway.

As you say, it's because the connection between the increased load and the factors requiring additional spending are at enough of a distance that they're hard to account for. If the datacenter operator argues (often with support from the power company, who has to convince government officials their rate increase is OK) that most of the grid upgrades were going to happen regardless and they've already paid for the increase fairly attributed to their operations, how can you really know whether that's true?

Power doesn’t just apperate out of thin air. It has to be generated and that has costs. If suddenly the grid draws more power then more costly sources have to feed it. Everyone pays for the same power.

The big consumer also buys in bulk and negotiates better rates etc.

There's also the supply/demand aspect of it. Some electricity is cheaper to provide than others - the cheapest is the renewable or nuclear that's already built in the area, but when demand is high, the grid provider will source electricity from more expensive sources - coal, natural gas, or importing it from neighboring utilities. So, using some made-up numbers, if your existing cost for 100MW is $0.10/Wh, getting the next 100MW might cost $0.50/Wh, bumping the cost for everyone up to $0.30/Wh.

KWh, but yes. I'm in CA so we don't have data centers because the cost of a Kwh is already like $123134^100

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> Point is, if you ban anything that makes noise you’ll be left with nothing, it’s pure selfish nimbyism

The US is large enough country and it should be possible to build DC far away from homes. That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY. I lived in 1km from a gas fired power station and did bot notice any noise at all. If a DC can be heard it is either too close or too loud.

> That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.

It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.

NIMBY is an acronym: No In My back Yard.

Some thing which get described as NIMBYism are better described as NIBYism.

A state housing complex is just housing. Not wanting that nearby is NIMBYism because it's about not wanting it specifically near your home even though it's, by definition, going to need to be done in a spot zoned for homes.

The question around a e.g. jet engine test site is very different though - more like "why would we need the jet engine test site to be within a mile of anyone's back yard in the first place"? Usually the answer is "we don't, it just kinda happened that way as the city grew".

Not wanting a data center next to your home is now "pure selfish NIMBYism". This is how sick we are becoming. It's hideous that this is now how we treat people with homes in the US. Everything must get worse, and worse, and worse, and if you cry out against any single thing, you must be a selfish asshole.

It makes me want to fucking cry, what's happening to my country.

Sorry, NIMBYism is on the way out. We are building high density housing, cafes, restaurants, shops, data centers, and offices all next to each other. Nothing you can do about it.

I used to live near a busy street. I eventually got used to the noise but when I bought my house I made sure to find a quiet spot. Now, its dead quiet at night and the difference in my quality of life is significant. I also made the city put shades on the street lights so they wouldn't shine on my house. Another huge improvement.

Peace is the dream, which is being slowly killed. People who value peace are being pushed farther and farther out. You used to be able to find peace in neighborhoods, but more and more people have to choose between community and peace.

Seems a bit harsh. Have you experienced the noise being described here first hand? How can you be sure it is the same as what you are experiencing and find acceptable?

The choices are not ban anything that makes noise and allow everything that makes noise.

For extra amusement, try living near a farm or a school. Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.

Public parks can also be a surprise if you don't like the sound of people playing. Add a court, and things get fun.

I once lived across the street from a public park with a court. One day the judge burned her thighs on the hot metal slide, and now it's a parking lot.

That industrial noise at night isn't required; it's just cheaper than being quieter.

> Also a state housing complex nearby with mentally unwell people screaming all night outside.

I think this would be the greatest annoyance to me, the other stuff becomes background noise eventually

I feel like the world needs more sound engineers. There's a constant humming of the machines and we all suffer for it. We also need more vigilance about preventing noise pollution. The beep, beep, beep may make a company feel like it is doing something for safety, but there is no counterforce that they have to answer to about what they are doing to everyone else not involved. (I know there is a better sound to replace beep beep beep but it hasn't made it to my neighborhood yet)

We would need to figure out a quantifiable metric for annoyance level. Municipal sound ordinances do tend to correctly utilize SPL(A) and SPL(C), with A-weighting being relevant for safety against ear injury (low frequencies have less influence) and C-weighting being relevant for annoyance level (low frequencies have more influence), but this isn't nearly enough. For example, ordinances carve out additional tolerance for burstiness, which makes sense for rare events like jackhammering but not for common events like routine plant operations. Sound with lots of harmonic content (think distortion) is more annoying than without. High frequencies can be worse if they reach you, but they're less likely to reach you (approaching a need for line-of-sight). It's complicated.

Here's a free idea for someone to run with: just as Zillow has a neighborhood "walkability" score prospective buyers might look at, there could be various pollution scores, including sound and light, sourced from some kind of Flock-like (ew) network of capture devices. Some folks are into mounting things like personal weather stations on their property, so maybe a new generation of devices capturing this type of data (with local signature-based identification of sources, and triangulation when the same thing is heard in multiple places, etc.) wouldn't be too far-fetched.

All the sound engineers in the world can't fix "don't care" and "want to".

A modern US city has the combined problems of cheap construction of residential buildings, with insufficient unit-to-unit and exterior noise isolation (builders "don't care"), and near-zero enforcement of vehicle noise laws (police and muffler shops "don't care", drivers "want to" be loud).

Contrast this with, say, Germany or Switzerland, where concrete construction is the norm, noise laws are often strictly enforced, and a modified car would get pulled over quickly.

It's the Simpsons "Everything's OK" alarm: (note: loud and annoying noise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxNp3bUDtxY

They could start with building codes. State of the art, beautiful new designs where you can hear every word of the meeting next door.

The constant humming that causes the overwhelming population-weighted noise pollution comes from cars and airplanes, due to the fact that in America it is currently not legal to build an apartment except within 100ft of a freeway or at the ends of airports.

That gave me a chuckle

The US seems like a pretty huge area for the number of people living there. Why do they need to build a data center 100m from a house, why not build it 1000m away?

Great video from Benn Jordan on data center noise causing illness to nearby residents: https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo

wow, super interesting. thx for sharing!

This just happened up north, apparently the largest proposed AI data center in Canada (Synapse's $10B 1GW campus in Olds, Alberta) was just put on pause after the Utilities Commission rejected its power application on March 6, 2026 due to noise pollution concerns from 20 gas turbines, 10 steam generators, and up to 600 diesel backups near 800 homes (just 200m away). The assessments failed to model cumulative worst-case noise. The proposal will be revised and resubmitted of course but the concern isn't going to go away.

Seriously, why do they have to build a DC 200m from homes? Is Alberta out of space?

Haha this is because of the on site gas turbines because we’ve decided that any power infrastructure is evil. You gotta love the NDFA that is the market finding the gaps in law to reach utility.

I live near a datacenter myself in San Francisco. No problems here.

This is where zoning rules make sense.

There are all kinds of externalities that we fail to accommodate in our market pricing.

I offer you a chatbot in this troubling time

The article very very carefully avoids contextualizing this site, so as a service, here you go:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sully+Rd,+Centreville,+VA/...

interesting that the data center noise is competing with a lot of airplanes and freeways

The aerial photo in the article makes the whole thing a little funny to me.

I've seen a few videos with the audible whine heard from people's houses even super far away from these datacenters. Guess we'll see in a few years whether they were worth building in the first place or whether they end up abandoned once the bubble bursts.

I assume once the bubble bursts they'll be turned into power supplies for bitcoin miners

I saw more than one video about datacenter noise that were clearly crypto mining. There are some questionable designs leveraging shipping containers and what sound like a lot of 120mm fans.

Hopefully not, but they expect that scenario. For those as ignorant as me, I started reading this https://cointelegraph.com/features/the-last-bitcoin-btc-mine

They expect transaction fees will overtake minting earnings.

These AI datacenters generally have invested quite a lot in Nvidia Chips and completely high end hardware by having DDR5 Chips etc.

And even more than that, the largest things for these things is how to supply enough water properly and water-cooling systems which aren't required in traditional systems.

They also are very conditional and spike the grid up and down with their use cases slowing the grid.

If the bubble bursts, which it will, It's hard to justify the billions of dollars spent on AI specific datacenters for essentially the bricks and mortars. I don't think that its very sound decision that they were worth building, it might make some compensation but not enough, in my opinion.

Person who probably has never lived next to an industrial site disappointed to find they don't like living next to an industrial site.

This is why we have zoning laws.

Can anyone provide a breakdown for what all these new data centers are used for?

Is this storage? If so, storing what?

Is this for AI/processing? If so, doing what?

Sane municipalities, counties, and states have noise restrictions for power generation equipment, most of the AHJs in my metro area require no more than 60dB of noise from 100’ away for a generator, that would easily prevent gas turbines from operating.

It’s common enough that generator manufacturers make different levels of enclosures to comply with noise regulations.

It’s likely impossible to use gas turbines to generate power in my state unless they’re very far away from anyone, rules linked below. The only type of land with no noise restrictions is undeveloped land, so you can operate forestry equipment but not gas turbines.

States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.

https://www.pca.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/p-gen6-01.pd...

> States that allow gas turbines anywhere near their residents homes does not give a shit about them, probably it’s a perfect circle venn diagram with states that reject expanded Medicare funding.

That’s a weird thing to say given the story is about Virginia.

Low-frequency noise is insidious and an assault on your sanity. Wind turbines are bad for it. And hea_t pump$ to a lesser extent.

Blocking low-frequency noise requires very heavy, well-designed construction, and retrofitting a typical dwelling to achieve large reductions is difficult and expensive.

This means all the blame goes onto the perpetrators – the developers, the politicians – because for all intents and purposes, residents can't do anything to stop it.

the comments here are better than the article lol

Genuine question but is the problem datacenters or more specifically AI specific datacenters?

Because all these talks of data-center disrupting everyday's life from all the videos I have watched somehow now involve the AI/GPU aspect which have definitely made things more energy intensive and more water intensive

But more specifically compute focused datacenters actually feel somewhat good/neutral to the region and you still need remote hands etc. so net employment.

Although one of the ideas I have with that is it would be better if the owner of the said datacenter either belonged to the community/cared about it and wasn't a massive corporation for example too.

It's the AI bubble which is the issue which has caused a Datacenter frenzy as nameless corporations take massive debts to build them and scramble to do so and cause issues in the process.

Vast majority of the new ones are for AI

In this case it is mostly the gas plants. They could have installed them far away, keeping the datacenter in place, or even better, use solar power. Or they could have built infrastructure in the middle of nowhere for datacenters to reside. In the end the problem is that maximum profit doesn't care about humans.