About

Datanoise is a white noise machine. Every sound on it is modeled on a real data center: the fans on the roof, the chillers, the transformer hum, the generator someone tests on a weekday morning. Pick a place, turn the lights off and listen.

Under the sound are the figures for each site: what it draws from the grid, what it takes from the water supply, who lives next to it. Open the info panel to read them, or leave it shut and sleep.

Most of what a phone does happens somewhere else, in a building with no windows and a great many fans. Those buildings are getting larger and more numerous, and they arrive in towns that did not plan for them. The noise is usually the first thing the neighbors notice.

In Ireland, data centres used 23% of all metered electricity in 2025, more than every urban household in the country combined. In South Memphis, NPR reported in 2024 that xAI’s supercomputer would need 150 megawatts while the utility had approved 50, and that gas turbines arrived on site without an air permit. In The Dalles, Oregon, the city went to court to keep Google’s water use secret and dropped the case after 13 months. Around Phoenix, an analysis by Ceres put on-site cooling at 385 million gallons of water a year.

The same industry also does some of the most careful engineering anywhere. Google’s newer building in The Dalles reports a power usage effectiveness of 1.06, meaning almost all of its power reaches the computers. In Hamina, Finland, heat from Google’s servers is expected to cover about 80% of the town’s district heating. Microsoft’s sealed server vessel off Orkney had failures at one eighth the rate of identical servers on land.

Every figure here comes from the public record and links to where we found it. What to make of them is up to you.

Nothing here is a recording. Every sound is generated in your browser while you listen, from a short list of numbers for each facility. The numbers describe the machinery; the code turns them into sound.

Fans

Each time a blade passes, it pushes a pulse of air. Enough pulses make a tone, at the fan’s speed in revolutions per minute, divided by 60, times the number of blades. The Ashburn preset runs its fans at 3,200 rpm with 7 blades, which puts that tone near 373 hertz. Around it is the rush of moving air, made from filtered noise. A brightness setting decides how much hiss gets through, and several slightly detuned banks play at once, the way a roof full of units never quite agrees.

Chillers and air handling

A low drone at the compressor’s pitch, swelling and easing on a cycle of a few minutes.

Transformer hum

Power grids alternate at 50 or 60 hertz, and transformers hum at twice that, 100 or 120. Each facility uses its own country’s grid frequency. This is the one parameter that is simply a fact.

Water and surroundings

Cooling towers spray and drip; sites cooled by air or seawater have little or none of it. Around the plant is its weather: rain in Dublin, wind and snow in Luleå, the river at The Dalles, gulls at Hamina, traffic in Singapore. For the vessel on the seabed off Orkney, everything is muffled.

Generators and turbines

Backup generators are tested on a schedule, and some sites run gas turbines. These swell in now and then and fade out over minutes. They are off by default in the mixer.

What is a guess

Fan speeds, blade counts, compressor pitches and levels are chosen to fit the kind of equipment and cooling each site is known to use. None of them were measured there. Where we know a facility runs turbines or sits on a river, the sound says so. The exact pitch of its fans is an informed guess.

Everything drifts slowly, over minutes, so the third hour is not a copy of the first, and loudness is matched between facilities so switching never jolts. If you live near one of these places and can record it from a public road, you can send us a recording. A person listens to each one first; nothing goes up on the site automatically.

Every number on the site comes from a page we read, and that page is listed with the date we read it. Power is given in megawatts and water in liters per day. Where a source gives gallons a year, we converted and averaged, so a site that uses most of its water in summer looks steadier here than it is.

Few operators publish what a single site draws. When the best public number is something else, such as built capacity in Phoenix and Singapore, connected load on the utility’s grid in Frankfurt, a national total for Ireland, or an estimate from satellite imagery in Abilene, we use it, mark it est., and say in a note what it actually measures.

When there is no public figure, the site says Not disclosed. We do not fill gaps with industry averages.

For clusters such as Dublin, Phoenix and Frankfurt, the location is a rough center, not a particular building. The captions that surface while you listen come from the same sources. No private person is named; officials appear by their role.

Data centers are approved, powered and supplied locally, and most of that happens in public, on the record, at meetings few people attend.

Find your planning or zoning board

Cities and counties publish agendas before every meeting. Data center projects tend to appear as rezonings, special exceptions, conditional use permits or site plans. The name of your county or city and the words “planning commission agenda” will usually find them. Most boards accept written comments and let residents speak.

Read the utility’s filings

In the United States, electric utilities file long-range plans and requests to serve large new customers with the state public utility commission, in dockets anyone can read. In Europe, grid operators and national energy regulators publish similar plans. Projected data center demand shows up there first, often years before a building does.

Ask about water and air

Water utilities publish annual reports, and many places publish water rights and extraction permits. Backup generators and on-site turbines need air permits from a state or county environmental agency, and applications are usually open for comment. In Memphis, it was the county health department that decided whether xAI’s turbines could stay.

None of this requires a position. Reading the documents is the useful part.