• Before he described the noise I was assuming he lived by a highway, because that’s exactly what it sounds like in the video.

  • If anyone’s curious, this is the AWS Tanner Campus. It’s right across the street from the official, marked on the map location for AWS’s us-east-1, and they are all IAD- buildings, so they’re part of what makes up the us-east-1 AWS region. The project was announced as early as 2020.

    It consists of four single-story data center buildings spanning nearly 800,000 square feet, which are supported by a massive 192-megawatt electrical substation and backup diesel generators.

    As others here have said, this is not an “AI” data center, it’s a data center that runs massive swathes of the internet as we know it. Either way it’s fucked that they’re approved to build this shit right behind peoples houses. They are right across the street from a regional airport, so maybe that areas zoned commercial? It’s definitely a weird area in general. Driving down prince william parkway you’re seeing tons of straight industrial support shit, like metal shops and construction supply stuff and warehouses with performance car shops with dynos and everything, then you just hit houses.

    It was probably zoned back when nobody ever thought anyone but the rednecks already out there would live that far outside the beltway, but now commuting from Manassas/Gainesville into DC or somewhere else inside the beltway is normal, and they’re building houses where they never thought they’d be building.

    Again though, fuck Amazon and Prince William County for assaulting these people like this.

  • I understand this whole newfound hate is coming from the AI bubble, but a bunch of cool stuff is in those DCs as well - most lemmy instances included.

  • Is the image for this just a man’s torso with his hand over his stomach like he’s going to have a baby or is it just me. I thought this was going to be very different at first

  • 12 hours

    It’s weird that they would build such a big annoying target in a country with so many rifles

  • Well that was pointless.

    Was there supposed to be something on the “sound readings” meter? Can I see it?

    No.

    • 4 hours

      Did you not hear the noise with your own two ears? Are you that fucking deaf and willfully ignorant that you you need to see a number and can’t, without it, hear exactly what he’s talking about?

      “It’s a conversation that never stops, is in your bedroom, and you can’t turn off, ever. It’s not loud but it never stops.” should be more than enough to make the point abundantly clear especially when you can fucking hear the sound in the video.

    • For what its worth, despite missing the punchline of the actual measurement, the guy knows what he is talking about. Taking a dB measurement in C weighting over some integration period is how to do it for this scenario. I doubt his meter is calibrated but its doing a good job.

    • 11 hours

      I hear it perfectly. It is a sort of background hum.

        • “yeah there’s a new giant structure and there’s a new persistent and pervasive sound in the region that both appeared around the same time, but there’s no data connecting the two. It could just be the sound of my own ego”

  • 17 hours

    Oh man, I hate data centers more every day. They’re burning energy and causing disturbances in order to support fucking what? What the fuck are we getting in return?

    • 6 hours

      Storing data on us and replacing human jobs with AI. No matter how many jobs your local leaders have been told data centers will create, they are intended to replace many more.

    • Slightly more convenient search engines. At least according to most of my IT-illiterate peers. “Just ask ChatGPT” - “Fuck, I can already do that with any other search engine, for 1/10th of the energy”.

      People never see the cost if they don’t pay it.

    • 14 hours

      Not all data centers are for AI. Practically anything you do on the internet lives or transits through a data center. A very serious answer to your question is simply “the internet”. AI data centers are just bigger and more dense than the ones that have been around for a long time.

        • 13 hours

          Are you sure about that? I haven’t been near one but have a single dell poweredge in my basement and it’s fucking loud without diy noise insulation around it. I can only imagine the noise a full building of these things is making.

          • 11 hours

            Since I’m getting downvoted and I’m genouinly curious, could someone explain how AI data centers are worse on a noise level than data centers for other purposes?

            I’m not saying they are quiet, I just don’t see which hardware for AI is so different from non-ai that it makes a big difference in noise production.

            • Turbine generators onsite to manage power spikes and reduce the company’s cost of buying power, in musk’s megadatacenter case, the cunt didnt even get permission, he just ordered it done, and the community suffers.

      • 8 hours

        Yes, but until AI, there weren’t nearly as many data centers and they were much smaller. Now massive data centers are going up all over the country, and no, hosting the internet is not their primary purpose

      • 12 hours

        But the reason most new datacenters are build is AI. AI is the cause that the number of datacenters are spiking, not any other poor excuse.

  • Made without AI will be the next organic non-gmo revolution, even though the latter was mostly a fad.

  • I used to live a few miles from I5 and that was loud and constant, but was a pretty soft kinda rushing sound not really that different from hearing the wind rustling trees; the sound going on in this video sounds like an idling diesel truck parked across the street.

    • I live close to a highway and it’s just white noise. I can tune it out outside and inside you can’t hear anything. Except for the motorbikes with custom exhausts. You can hear those assholes even inside. And it’s not because of the highway, you can hear the motorbikes all on adjacent streets as well. It’s really crazy to me that some idiots are allowed to add huge amounts of noise to our environment just for fun. Fuck bikers.

    • 12 hours

      I live 1.5km away from a busy intl airport and there are jets all day idling their engines, it’s not loud, but it is quite constant. Now, I chose to live near the airport because it’s a great location and very convenient, but I do smell burning rubber whenever the wind is blowing my way and a plane lands. But at least the flights quiet down to a trickle at night time. Data enters never quiet down. I’d rather an airport 1.5km from me than a data centre. At least the airport benefits me in some way.

  • 12 hours

    We should seriously consider a right to destroy noise making crap in general. Currently listening to a 110Db mower, I should be allowed to go out and stomp it, except, maybe, on Sunday afternoons.

      • I did and can’t hear it. Apparently it’s like a conversation and a highway.

        • It’s a low frequency hum throughout the video, others compare it to an idling diesel truck and I agree.

          • Why on earth would I do that? It needs to be removed, not pushed onto deaf and hoh communities, who still feel the effects of constant vibration without the benefit of being able to sense its sources.