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Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons

Benn Jordan5 HN recommenders · 2026–2026
1.8M views · explainer · news · Uploaded 2026-02-18

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

Cited in data center siting debates as evidence that noise and infrasound can seriously affect people living nearby.

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10 comments from Hacker News

@soulofmischief2026 · in “Montana Leads the Nation with Groundbreaking Right to Compute Act”

This research presentation from Benn Jordan will hopefully change your mind on the noise issue and its consequences. I highly recommend it. [VIDEO]

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@schainks2026 · in “Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal”

Plugging this video about infrasound, which I only recently learned was a thing: [VIDEO] These datacenters can be built in ways to limit this kind of noise pollution, but it appears local leaders do not think about things like this that can truly harm their constituents.

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@subscribed2026 · in “Utah greenlights 9GW AI campus using over twice state electricity”

No, it will just burn GWs worth of natural gas. Benn Jordan has captured quite an interesting evidence: [VIDEO]

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@Torn2026 · in “Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200”

This is a really great watch from Benn Jordan on the topic [VIDEO] Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in

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@e402026 · in “Why We've Filed a Referendum”

Watch these [VIDEO] [LINK] [LINK] Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those. Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.

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@bobsomers2026 · in “xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab”

It's easy to deliver things fast when you don't care at all for the local communities or residents whose lives you ruin in the process. [VIDEO] (@ 4:08)

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@code_biologist2026 · in “Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents”

Yes, the noise pollution is insane. Benn Jordan's YT video "Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons" is an insightful, scary 30 min video covering the datacenter infrasound noise, and the nasty things infrasound does to people: [VIDEO]

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@budududuroiu2026 · in “Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri”

I'm not an AI booster, nor an AI detractor. I like tech and progress. I'm mortified at the possibility of a data centre being built next to me at some point in the future [1]. [1]: [VIDEO]

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@one33seven2026 · in “Nvidia's 45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero”

The value of an AI data center in your area is negative, not near zero. Pollution, water use, heat, infrasound ( [VIDEO] ) and so much more... But at least we may get some cheap heat in the future

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@ffsm82026 · in “GLM5.2 on AMD MI355X at 2626 tok/s/node at over 2x lower cost than Blackwell”

The people having glass literally break from the vibrations would probably disagree with your opinion [VIDEO] Yet here we are, discussing "data center" as if they're standardized and of similar (nose) isolation. There are no meaningful regulations in building them, and they can be incredibly polluting. So your experience with a potentially well isolated one is sadly not the norm going forward. And we don't even know how close you lived, if you're eg talking about "within 5km/3miles" then your experience would also have little value in this discussion in general.

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