Communities next to data centers are reporting a cluster of health complaints that closely matches what electrically sensitive people have described for decades. A Bloomberg analysis of 770,000 home sensors suggests why: data centers inject enormous amounts of “dirty electricity” back onto the grid, and the worst power distortion in the country clusters within 20 miles of them.
David Sacks (who ran AI policy for the White House) told the G20 that about $800 billion is being invested in AI infrastructure in the United States this year, that the figure is expected to reach $1.4 trillion next year, and that the only comparable buildout was the railroads in the 1800s.¹ Data center construction now accounts for nearly a quarter of all nonresidential building in the country.¹
Because data centers need city-sized amounts of power, land, and fiber, many are being placed in less affluent communities (including throughout the Midwest, which is a large part of why I wrote this). Residents there are experiencing rising electricity bills (as grid upgrade costs get passed to ratepayers; the clearest documented case being the PJM grid serving the mid-Atlantic, whose independent monitor attributed most of a ten-fold jump in capacity prices to data center demand),¹ large water draws for cooling,¹ constant noise from cooling systems and generators, and air pollution from onsite turbines.¹
A minority of people are electrically hypersensitive (becoming quite ill around EMFs), some (myself included) are EMF sensitive but can tolerate everyday life, some don’t notice EMFs but have symptoms that resolve once they turn off their wifi at night, and many seem unaffected. The standard rebuttal is that EMFs are too weak to be ionizing, so any effect must be thermal, so consumer devices are harmless, whereas in reality they can still do many harmful things (e.g., cell phones cause blood cells to clump together, a process I believe underlies many diseases).
Given this, the symptoms people reported from living next to data centers (which were attributed to the noise) caught my eye. Beyond the constant hum, vibration and generator fumes, residents consistently report sleep disruption, headaches or migraines, feeling constantly on edge, fatigue and poor concentration, nausea, dizziness or vertigo, ear pressure or fullness, tinnitus, and feeling the sound in the head or chest,¹,²,³ along with pets becoming restless and birds disappearing. Many of these (headaches, sleep disruption, fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, nausea, dizziness, tinnitus) overlap with what individuals with electromagnetic hypersensitivity report,¹,²and already EMF sensitive individuals report some of their other symptoms (e.g., burning skin) near data centers.
Data centers produce a constant hum from their cooling systems (along with diesel generators during tests and outages, and at some sites gas turbines that run around the clock), and residents describe it as a vacuum left on that can still be heard after going inside, along with vibration in windows, walls, and sometimes the body, and a sense of pressure rather than an ordinary sound.¹^,^² There is decent scientific support that chronic environmental noise alone causes or worsens many of the reported effects (sleep disruption, headaches, stress and irritability, fatigue and poor concentration),¹and a large portion of what these facilities emit is infrasound (sound below the typical threshold of human hearing), which is a recognized hazard at high exposure levels and has been extensively linked to the symptoms near data centers that are not classically associated with EMFs, such as ear fullness or pain, hearing deterioration, nausea, vertigo, and feeling the sound in the head or chest¹,²,³ (along with it being widely recognized that species like elephants can hear infrasound and become agitated when it is present). This is why many who have moved away from data centers report their homes could no longer be used as a refuge, their pets became restless, and the birds left.
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