Article makes a huge deal about humming/buzzing but there’s no way that’s a real thing right? What would be the reason it would go beyond like any HVAC-ish thing on a large building? Lost me at the first sentence :(
It's sad seeing people impacted by these data centers considering how little voice they have. I don't think anyone wants to live near a data center unless they actually worked there.
Ashburn/Loudoun resident here, lived right next to us-east-1 for 10+ years. No, the noise is not impactful. The data centers are very quiet on the outside. More noise comes from Dulles Airport nearby. Main problem is 1. visuals. They are horrendous blobs to look at. 2. land/electricity values. Gone up a lot in the past few years. Happy to answer any questions.
These things are ugly and take up a lot of space. They do have their fans which claim they do not generate that much traffic relative to their size since, they don't have that many people working there. For example, if they were replaced with the same sized office buildings, they'd probably put more strain on the road infrastructure and so on. Also, some of the property taxes collected from DC operators supposedly go to lowering the property taxes of residents in the county.
> "Northern Virginia was really at the centre for the growth of the internet, [it was] where AOL was headquartered, and so naturally they have the talent, they have the people already there, it was just easier to make [the data centres] there," cybersecurity expert Thomas Hyslip said.
“The décor of the machine room is unmarred by ornament. The room was created by walling off an area of the underground parking garage of a suburban Virginia office tower. The ceiling is low; harsh light pours out of fluorescent tubes; the air is filled with the white noise of a hundred computer cooling fans and a hint of battery fumes. Standing in this crowded space, surrounded by hard-working and very slightly grungy machinery, gives an interesting perspective and sense of scale, which is exactly what I was looking for in coming here. The room is no bigger than a two-car garage, and yet by some estimates more than half the traffic on the Internet passes through here.”
I was imagining hearing the bird-chirping-like beeps of thousands of PCs constantly rebooting, since some subset is always in the process of restarting. Probably not audible outside.
It looks like they are directly on the landing/takeoff path to Washington Dulles airport.
All around it looks like sparsely built countryside. I wonder what was the risk analysis that was done for the data centers. I guess the better places without the noise have people living there so datacenters went to the low value land.
Having watched rather a lot of disaster movies recently, I can't help wondering if, with so many data centers in one area, whether there's been any extra spending on defense? Imagine the chaos if a hostile element decided to take out an area of Loudoun County, especially with Dulles Airport nearby. Eggs in one basket comes to mind.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 24.3 ms ] threadhttps://www.loudoun.gov/FAQ.aspx?QID=1793
> said, noting the humming or buzzing noise the centre emits scares away a lot of wildlife from his area
I imagine trees and fields that have been cleared and the roads paved probably play a good part as well.
Relevant Wikipedia entry-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
“Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.[3]”
I love how this sentence is written like some sci-fi premise. The source is much more clinical about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20050214071013/http://www.wolfso...
“The décor of the machine room is unmarred by ornament. The room was created by walling off an area of the underground parking garage of a suburban Virginia office tower. The ceiling is low; harsh light pours out of fluorescent tubes; the air is filled with the white noise of a hundred computer cooling fans and a hint of battery fumes. Standing in this crowded space, surrounded by hard-working and very slightly grungy machinery, gives an interesting perspective and sense of scale, which is exactly what I was looking for in coming here. The room is no bigger than a two-car garage, and yet by some estimates more than half the traffic on the Internet passes through here.”
"'I never thought they'd build a 200th data center,' says woman who lives in county with 199 data centers."
All around it looks like sparsely built countryside. I wonder what was the risk analysis that was done for the data centers. I guess the better places without the noise have people living there so datacenters went to the low value land.