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.”
