The AI Boom's Forgotten nuisance: Data Centers Are Driving Communities to Court

The Sound No One Measured

Steve Brown lives a mile and a quarter from a data center that did not exist when he moved to Vineland, New Jersey, twenty-five years ago.

Now it fills his nights. Not with sirens or traffic, but with a sound he describes simply: BGRRRRRRRRRRR. A drone that oscillates. A growl. It comes through walls, through sleep, through the porch where he says he can feel vibration in his bones. He does not know which machine makes it. Generators? Pumps? Cooling fans? He only knows it never stops, and once you hear it, hearing nothing else becomes impossible.

Brown is one of three named plaintiffs in a lawsuit against DataOne, the company building the 350-megawatt facility on land that was a nine-hole golf course as recently as October 2024. The case, filed by Michigan environmental firm Liddle Sheets PC, is seeking class-action status for anyone living within a mile of the site. Laura Sheets told the Guardian there are already four data center noise cases in court, and they are preparing to file more.

This is the second-order war of the AI infrastructure boom, and nobody outside affected ZIP codes is talking about it.

The Stepchild of Environmental Law

Jamie Banks, president of Quiet Communities Inc, calls noise the forgotten stepchild of data center opposition. For years, the headlines have been about water — how much hyperscalers consume for cooling. About energy — how much power these facilities suck from grids already straining under AI demand. About emissions and zoning and property values.

Noise barely registers in any of those conversations.

The regulatory gap is not accidental. In 1972, Congress tasked the EPA with regulating sound and funded regional noise control centers. By 1982, the Reagan administration defunded those offices and shut them down. The EPA has done no appreciable research or enforcement on ambient noise since. Mufflers on motorcycles still carry EPA stamps from that era — relics of a brief federal commitment that evaporated before most Americans knew what sound pollution meant.

Except, apparently, to people like Banks. Quiet Communities recently won a lawsuit against the EPA for failing to regulate sound. The ruling, handed down in July, opens a legal path that could reshape how data centers are built across the country.

Eric Zwerling runs the only remaining EPA regional noise center in the country — a facility at Rutgers University that survived only by becoming the mandatory training ground for every noise control officer in New Jersey. Zwerling has spent fifty years watching the science of low-frequency sound advance.

His conclusion: the permissible sound levels for sources like data centers need to be re-evaluated. If designed properly, these facilities can be relatively quiet. If designed without considering sound emissions, the impact on nearby residents can be virtually catastrophic.

The Physics Nobody Planned For

Data center noise is not ordinary noise. It is low-frequency — narrow bands in the hum, whoosh, and whistle range that travel long distances through atmosphere and soil. What makes it尤其 insidious is that low frequencies do not just register on ears. They register on bodies.

Michael Gentile, another Vineland plaintiff, says he first noticed the sound before he knew what was causing it. He called the county health department about twenty times. When inspectors came to measure decibels, Gentile asked them to consider vibration. He pointed to his porch and said: Can you feel that?

They did not have tools to measure it.

That gap matters. Decibel meters capture volume on a logarithmic scale that begins at the edge of human hearing. A whisper is thirty decibels. A normal conversation, sixty. A rock band, one hundred — a thousand times louder than that conversation. But decibels alone do not capture frequency, and frequency is where the real harm lives.

Low-frequency sound creates atmospheric pressure waves that move through structures, not just air. They induce physiological stress responses — cardiovascular, glandular, respiratory — exactly the kind the surgeon general warned about in 1968. Sustained exposure, even at moderately high levels, produces what researchers call generalized stress reaction. People near data centers do not just hear noise. They live inside it.

Who Builds Next, and Where

The political geometry around this issue is already shifting. Vineland sits in one of New Jersey’s most Republican congressional districts. Yet a challenger for that seat recently drove a truck through town with digital billboards reading: No datacenter here. Both parties appear to be sensing electoral risk.

DataOne and its tenant, Nebius — the Amsterdam-based spin-off of Russian search engine Yandex — have responded with a mix of mitigation and community outreach. They built a northerly wall to deflect sound, adjusted construction hours, promised quiet fuel cells for power, and retained a sound mitigation specialist. They also offered weekly baskets of organic, non-GMO fruits and vegetables to underprivileged residents.

The gestures are telling. When companies resort to produce programs, they are acknowledging a problem they have not yet learned how to engineer around.

What happens next depends on whether the Quiet Communities lawsuit against the EPA triggers a broader regulatory revival. If the ruling opens the door for courts to require noise impact assessments the way they require environmental ones, the calculus for hyperscaler siting changes dramatically. Properties that look cheap on energy and zoning may carry hidden costs in litigation and retrofitting.

Data centers will not stop being built. The AI boom demands them. But the next wave of facilities may need to sit farther from homes, or be engineered with sound as a primary constraint rather than an afterthought. The companies that figure that out first will avoid the lawsuits. The ones that do not will learn, as Brown and Gentile are learning, what it means to live inside a machine that never sleeps.