this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
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I used to live down the street from a great big data center. It wasn't a big deal. It's basically just a building full of servers with extra AC units.
Inside? Loud AF (think: Jet engine. Wear hearing protection).
Outside: The hum of lots of industrial air conditioning units. Only marginally louder than a big office building.
A data center this big is going to have a lot more AC units than normal but they'll be spread all around the building. It's not like living next to an airport or busy train tracks (that's like 100x worse).
I think its more that their power bills are going to go up 3x.
And water bills too.
Well, if it is a bubble (at least the centralization part, not the "AI" part), then they are building locations with plenty of energy and water connected. Can help with re-industrialization a bit later.
Yep. The situation of data centers being planned and constructed everywhere at the same time is entirely different from even 5 years ago. Things will get expensive. They‘re buying the hardware, resources and space that we all need and will sell them to us at an up price.
Yeah data centers they are building here give two fucks about noise canceling. They are as loud on the outside.
Not all datacenters bother with noise abaitment.
*Abatement
Depends. Normally yes (I’ve been in data centers like you’re talking about), but because it’s likely using GPUs for the LLM it’s probably considerably louder. Closer to this, which is a crypto mine: https://theweek.com/tech/the-noise-of-bitcoin-mining-is-driving-americans-crazy
It doesn’t look like it will even be a single building. For a site that size they’re going to need maintenance buildings and a power plant, grounds crews, security, climate services, offices, cafeteria, reception; probably put some R&D labs out there. It’s almost certainly not going to be one huge monolith, although it will certainly be mostly server buildings.
The noise is one of the least egregious effects of a data center. Utility costs are going to be a much bigger indicator of the data center's impact on the area.