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Comment by folkrav | Hacker News Reader

“Humming quietly”? Really? Humming, yeah, sure, but ask the people living next door how quiet they are.

The data centers near me are pretty quiet. They’re set back from the road enough that they’re no louder than the background noise of traffic, wind, airplanes overhead, etc. I understand my small sample size doesn’t apply everywhere, but it does negate “all data centers are loud.” Some data centers might be loud.

Are they pre-AI data centers or are they the new ones being rapidly built to capture AI compute demand?

They were built before AI insanity. What’s different about the new generation of data centers?

Oh, data centers are no louder than having planes flying overhead? And they are that 'quiet' a constant 24/7? Man, why would people complain about that?

The new ones will be though. Look up the specs for the NVIDIA Vera Rubin: no fans; recycled liquid cooling.

That's inside the DC, right? I'd think that even with current generation GPUs the noise of the fans won't be audible outside the building but the cooling infra that is outside the building plus (backup) power generation through gas or diesel generators.

EDIT: recently I read about (I guess on HN) a new planned Amazon datacenter that was super environment-friendly. So in fact it might eventually be possible to create silent DCs but we'll see how this turns out.

Maybe, but for today, er 6 days ago:

Public hearing set for nearly 650 diesel generators tied to Amazon data center.

Some new ones might be.

Agreed in principle for today’s new ones, though with all the buying frenzy it quickly becomes hard to procure anything but the latest hardware and the economics of older generation hardware makes little sense for new data center deployments.

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