This Viral Data Center Sounds Like Satan’s Buzzsaw

You really have to hand it to local TV journalists lately for their stories on data centers. Over the past year or so, they’ve shown us the lives of people near these facilities dealing with an annoying, low-level screech that seems like it would make life unlivable pretty quickly. But a Detroit reporter named Mike Duffy of WXYZ-TV captured a story about a data center emitting what sounds like a demonic scream that seems like it makes every second in this community a form of torture I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. The noise is there “24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Duffy says. And people live right across the street. Just watch the footage: Obviously in a news report, it’s impossible to truly judge exactly how the noise sounds from inside one of these homes, but there’s a revealing moment starting at the 2 minute and 10 second mark in the video. The screech is followed by a shot of Marjorie Finn, who’s been hearing this noise nonstop for years, and that experience looks to be indelibly etched on her face. Duffy asks her how her life has changed since the sound started, and the pause before she answers says everything.

WXYZ-TV says this facility in Dowagiac, Michigan is called Hyperscale Data, owned by Las Vegas-based Alliance Cloud Services LLC. Later in the report, we learn that these are largely crypto mining rigs making this noise. I’m informed by a blog post on the website of the crypto company Koinly that “The average Bitcoin miner ranges between 50dB to 70dB,” a noise level Koinly compares to a vacuum cleaner, and says “If you’ve got one in your home, you’ll know about it.”

Duffy holds a handheld decibel meter in the air a few times in the report, and the readings are indeed in this range, mostly on the lower end. Duffy says the city of Dowagiac has fined Hyperscale for exceeding noise limits, which are either 55 decibels at night, or 65 decibels in the day. Hyperscale, Duffy says, contest’s the city’s methodology. John Stewart, Hyperscale’s chief marketing officer gave the following statement to WXYZ-TV Detroit: “We have been part of Dowagiac for five years, and take the recent concerns raised by residents seriously. As we complete our operational transition away from cryptocurrency mining and toward AI compute infrastructure and advanced robotics, we intend to do our part to help reduce overall sound levels in the area. Roughly half of the mining equipment is already offline, and we expect the rest to be shut down completely within the next three months […] We remain committed to being a good neighbor and believe the steps we are taking reflect that.”