‘It’s all you can hear’: New Jersey lawsuit takes on datacenter’s noise pollution

It’s a sound Steve Brown, a 63-year-old Vineland, New Jersey resident, literally hears in his sleep: BGRRRRRRRRRRR.

It drones, oscillates, growls – these are machines at industrial scale. Are they generators? Pumps? Fans? Brown does not know what equipment causes the sound or why. He only knows two things: he’s tired of it, and it’s coming from DataOne – a 350MW datacenter under construction a little more than a mile from his home of 25 years.

“It woke me up probably around, I don’t know, somewhere around 2 o’clock in the morning,” said Brown, who was weary by mid-afternoon. “I couldn’t get back to sleep, because once you hear it, it’s all you can hear.”