[butvacuum]

You say they have a large impact, but having lived somewhere with some of the largest data centers- they very much don't. At least not more so then any other structure that paves over greenery.

love to debate actual discission points. pull up "datacenter dfw" on google maps for mine.

[well_ackshually]

a constant low 60dB 20Hz hum in the background, 24/7 is as close as a a torture technique invented by the CIA as it can get.

[ffsm8]

The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion

https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?is=sg09k66iutKFIFSo

Yet here we are, discussing "data center" as if they're standardized and of similar (nose) isolation.

There are no meaningful regulations in building them, and they can be incredibly polluting. So your experience with a potentially well isolated one is sadly not the norm going forward. And we don't even know how close you lived, if you're eg talking about "within 5km/3miles" then your experience would also have little value in this discussion in general.

[jml7c5]

>The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion

Can you cite a source for this? It's not in the video, as far as I can tell.

I would be wary of Benn Jordan's videos. They are full of mistakes and misrepresentations, as Andy Masley has convincingly demonstrated: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...

I recall seeing Benn Jordan's responses on Bluesky and thinking they were quite poor. He was unwilling to admit to mistakes, and kept trying to grasp at newly searched papers that didn't actually support his arguments.

[butvacuum]

It's irrelevant. Glass is a fickle mistress- a factory defect from 20 years ago can be the nucleus for the whole pane to shatter for any reason, or no reason.

Anything loud enough to crack any pane of glass that gets near it means federal agencies are very interested.

[hypfer]

Benn unfortunately is one of those people that actually feel stuff, which is a trait that easily gets exploited by bad actors.

Indeed, he shot himself in the foot there pretty bad, but I would argue that that was just the result of successful Agitation.

I would personally strongly prefer being in the same room with Benn compared with Andy, because one of them is authentic, while the other is calculating. Though, arguably, Benn has been catching up on that lately too.

But yeah, taking stuff with a grain of salt should be the default regardless of the person speaking.

[apublicfrog]

The fact that people have lived and worked near data centres for decades and didn't even know what the term meant - let alone be adversely impacted by them - probably indicates they're broadly an non issue. All of a sudden out of nowhere, AI and data centres got intermingled by the media and now people seem to have big issues with them.

[bayindirh]

Because the dynamics have shifted enormously inside the rack.

10 years ago, I was running 4 CPU servers with 48 cores and 128GB of RAM in 2U enclosures with a maximum power consumption of 500W or so. I was able to stick ~20 of them in a 42U rack, totaling 10kW.

A data center full of these can be cooled with CRACs and hot/cold aisles without much problem. This is still too much for a bog-standard server colocation operation, but for HPC, that was normal and manageable.

Now, a ~1U server houses 4 SOTA NVIDIA GPUs, 64 cores, magnitudes more RAM. This server alone uses ~3KW of power. This means you go anywhere between 30kW to 50kW per rack, and you have many racks.

Of course this means more power comes in, more heat comes out. This means more sophisticated infrastructure: bigger and beefier primary and secondary power systems, beefier cooling, more heat, more noise, in short "more of everything".

Of course when you cram this much energy and heat into a relatively small space, its effect on the environment will be much more pronounced.

Facebook's previous SOTA datacenter used water infused, HEPA filtered free flowing air accross the datacenter. Now, it's server level direct liquid cooling with extensive water treatment and oversight on coolant parameters.

Compare this having a hand warmer vs. coal ember in your hand. The latter needs a much more elaborate setup to prevent it burning you badly.

[Animats]

Megawatt racks are coming.[1][2] 10x or 20x more than current practice. There is a lot of plumbing involved. See [2] for more than you really want to know about the plumbing. "You got 400 gallons per minute?" for his rack, the sales rep asks. He's saying that you need to start planning for power and coolant flow far beyond what data center planners previously considered.

That kind of energy density is scary.

[1] https://blog.se.com/datacenter/2025/10/16/the-1-mw-ai-it-rac...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ssp1t-g_wM

[butvacuum]

Why are you implying all datacenters are GPU farms? You can't retrofit that kind of power density into existing buildings.

You can stuff GPU servers into existing buildings- but even with significant upgrades you end up with a lot of empty space on the floor that can't be used.

[bayindirh]

Two main reasons.

1. Article is about AI, so I have given the example for an AI datacenter.

2. In pure CPU datacenters, the power dynamics do not change much. I can add more servers to a single rack, but the rack power is again in the 30kW to 50kW range, so you're planning and building for the same power capacity.

> You can stuff GPU servers into existing buildings-

Yes.

> but even with significant upgrades you end up with a lot of empty space on the floor that can't be used.

Yes & No. It's not impossible to convert an old datacenter to support ~35KW/rack capacity, but it's not cheap, and you'll have more worries than holes, piping, building and power. Namely, can your floor handle that much weight to begin with?

[Liftyee]

Though, the new data centers are not entirely the same. Increasing use of onsite gas turbines to generate power instead of using grid power changes their noise+air pollution profile.

[fragmede]

The problem these days is lack of nuance. It should seem entirely reasonable to be pro-datacenters-if-they're-done-right, but it feels like there are only two sides to any issue. Gas turbine whine noise isn't coming from the data center, it's being used to power the data center, but the camp is either pro data center or not, and fuck any nuance.

[ninjalanternshk]

The problem is people keep trying to regulate businesses by name instead of by the effects they have.

If we had regulations on noise, vibration, emissions, water use, electromagnetic radiation, whatever else, then it wouldn’t matter what people tried to build — if it fits within the guidelines great, otherwise back to the drawing board.

Putting “data center” in your ordinances is as lazy and ineffective as putting “abattoir.”

[altcognito]

> If we had regulations on noise, vibration, emissions, water use, electromagnetic radiation, whatever else, then it wouldn’t matter what people tried to build

We certainly do! It’s just often overridden and ignored for these companies and data centers

[quickthrowman]

> If we had regulations on noise, vibration, emissions, water use, electromagnetic radiation, whatever else, then it wouldn’t matter what people tried to build — if it fits within the guidelines great, otherwise back to the drawing board.

Sane jurisdictions do have regulations regarding these things. Not all jurisdictions are sane, some of them are run by people who sell out their residents.

Suburbs and cities around me all have noise regulations, my state has its own pollution regulations, and the local water utilities don’t hook up customers that stress the system. Unfortunately there are places like Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi that don’t give two shits about their citizens and let companies run temporary natural gas turbines permanently and all kinds of other nonsense.

[Forgeties79]

Because the reality is while we all debate the nuances companies just do whatever they want, and it’s usually whatever offloads the most issues to the public because it saves them more money.

[__egb__]

Maybe the lack of nuance is due to learning, through decades of experience, that the assumption “it won’t be done right” can be baked in.

[wongarsu]

So people have a decades-long expectation that local government will fail them?

This does sound plausible, but it's also pretty sad and not a sign of a healthy democracy

[butvacuum]

afaik, it's only the so called "portable" generators openAI used to contravene noise and pollution regulations.

[lnsru]

Sounds exactly like the stories with 5G cell towers. Almost no problems with GSM and then suddenly 5G is big issue.

[ninjalanternshk]

> There are no meaningful regulations in building them

If a municipality doesn’t have emissions, noise, water use, etc regulations, that’s a serious failure in governance.

We don’t need nor want the word “data center” in regulations anymore than we need the word “abattoir.”

The names of the things we build change all the time. Their impact on their communities don’t.

We need to regulate impact, not the name or type of business.

If we did, nobody would know or care about data centers and they wouldn’t be affecting their communities, because they’d be operating under established impact regulations.

[rvba]

Why are you using internet then? The (highly optimized) HN server sits in a rack too.

So you want to use the internet but dont want the data center in your backyard?

[rpdillon]

How far do you live from a data center?