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@HedgieMarkets
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4h
🦔Turn your sound on for this one. This is what it sounds like to live next to an AI data center, 24 hours a day. In Dowagiac, Michigan, residents sued after a facility run by Hyperscale Data ran around the clock at 78 decibels outside their homes. The company offered to buy their houses rather than fix the noise. One family has lived on that street for nearly a century.
My Take
This isn’t one town with one bad facility. Microsoft faces a class-action in Wisconsin over data center noise residents can hear a mile and a half from the property line. In Virginia, one-third of data centers sit within 200 feet of homes. Noise from thousands of servers can hit 96 decibels, and diesel backup generators reach 105, which is a jet overhead. Residents report headaches, nausea, and sleep problems. Property values near this kind of infrastructure drop up to 20%. The company response in Michigan was to offer to buy the homes rather than quiet the facility, homes that families spent decades in, priced against a corporate buyout.
Water in Oregon, wells in Georgia, ratepayer costs in Louisiana, river water in California, and now noise in Michigan and Wisconsin. None of this was in the brochure when these projects got approved. Closed-loop cooling and proper sound barriers exist and would solve most of this, but they cost more, so the companies skip them and the neighbors lose sleep and equity instead.
Hedgie🤗