Quiet communities’ founder quoted in Guardian article about data center noise
by Daniel Fink, MD, Chair, The Quiet Coalition
Photo Credit: Quiet Communities
The Guardian recently quoted Quiet Communities, Inc.’s founder and president, Jamie Banks, PhD, MSc, in an article about data center noise. Quiet Communities is the parent organization of The Quiet Coalition. The article is about a lawsuit in New Jersey which alleges damage from data center noise that can be heard up to a mile away from the data center building. Banks said, “What I say is that there’s really four problems here: three are given a great deal of attention — energy consumption, water use, and contamination. The forgotten stepchild is noise.”
Governments and the societies they govern have difficulty dealing with new situations that haven’t occurred before. Some governments deal better with them, but many don’t. The fumbling American response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the unavailability of test kits and confusing advice from a government that didn’t like counting the number of cases, led to more than 600,000 deaths in the first year of the pandemic. If the U.S. had responded as well as South Korea, fewer than 100,000 Americans would have died.
As far as we know, existing noise regulations at all levels of American government are inadequate to deal with data center noise, a novel noise source that produces high-intensity, low-frequency noise continuously, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. There are limited studies of continuous noise exposure in sailors on aircraft carriers, and these only looked at hearing loss. But noise has auditory and non-auditory health effects too. The non-auditory health effects that have been studied generally involved transportation noise, which is not continuous, and they concluded that Noise disrupting sleep is especially harmful. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies of continuous noise exposure on the public and no acoustical engineering studies measuring and characterizing data center noise.
For data centers, Norway may be the world’s leader. Norway temporarily banned new cryptocurrency mining data centers and regulates other data centers. In the U.S., New York recently declared a moratorium on new data centers. Many economists see no legitimate role for cryptocurrencies, and any potential benefits of artificial intelligence appear to be balanced by the many problems its use causes.
New York’s moratorium seems like a good idea. A pause in new data center construction seems entirely reasonable until more is known about their adverse effects on society, including those caused by noise. And for those who advocate for data centers, I would ask this question: If they are such a good thing, why do so many projects require local authorities to sign non-disclosure agreements while they are being planned?
