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

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.”

Of all the concerns Americans have raised about datacenters – including mind-boggling electricity demands, water use and emissions – sound pollution ranks high among them, according to attorneys, experts and the people whose homes are nearby.

Now, Brown and two of his neighbors are the named plaintiffs in a lawsuit that alleges the sound is a nuisance for up to one mile around the datacenter, which is seeking class-action status. They are represented by a seasoned environmental pollution law firm in Michigan: Liddle Sheets PC.

“We have four cases that are being litigated in court against datacenters for noise, and we’re gearing up to file quite a few more,” said Laura Sheets, attorney for the class. “This is one of several.”

Opposition to datacenters across the country has led to raucous town halls, protests and now potential election consequences. Republicans recently told AI companies they were concerned backlash could swing elections. Democrats appear to have also smelled blood in the water: a challenger for Vineland’s very red congressional seat hired a truck outfitted with digital billboards reading: “No datacenter here.”

The Vineland datacenter, at 2.4m sq ft, represents both the scale and speed with which many facilities are coming to American communities. As recently as October 2024, the site was a brand new nine-hole public golf course. By March 2025, Amsterdam-based Nebius, a spin-off of Russian search-engine Yandex, had contracted with DataOne. Since spring, permit meetings and town halls about the datacenter have packed the Landis Theater, a music venue in town.

DataOne executives have sought to quell the backlash with a town hall of their own and a “microsite” dedicated to questions about the datacenter. The company even promised, “weekly baskets of organic, non-GMO fruits and vegetables” to “underprivileged residents of Vineland”.

“What I say is that there’s really four problems here: three are given a great deal of attention – energy consumption, water use and contamination,” said Jamie Banks, president of Quiet Communities Inc, a non-profit advocacy group. “The forgotten stepchild is noise.”

The dangers of noise to public health have been recognized since at least 1968, when then US surgeon general, William H Stewart, attended the first meeting of the American Speech and Hearing Association in Washington DC.

“Aside from hearing, it has been demonstrated that noise can cause physiological changes,” Stewart said in a keynote address. “These include cardiovascular, glandular and respiratory effects reflective of the generalized stress reaction,” which can occur “under sustained high level, or even moderately high noise conditions”.

Congress tasked the EPA in 1972 with regulating sound and funded regional noise centers. They got to work regulating consumer goods such as motorcycles – and people can still appreciate the relics of this work on EPA-stamped-and-approved mufflers.

However, when the Reagan administration defunded noise pollution offices in 1982, regional centers closed, and the EPA has done no appreciable research or enforcement since. Noise pollution, as a priority for federal government enforcement, was all but forgotten.

Except by people like Bank. As class actions scrutinizing the sound of datacenters ramp up, Quiet Communities won an important legal victory – they sued the EPA for failing to regulate sound. In July, they won.

Now, there is just one EPA regional noise center still in operation: the Rutgers University Noise Technical Assistance Center in New Jersey. Eric Zwerling, its director, kept the center alive by turning it into the training center for every noise control officer in the state.

“It’s 50 years since then – there’s been a lot more research on the impacts of low frequency,” said Zwerling. “My personal opinion – not that of Rutgers and the center, [is] the permissible sound levels for sources such as this need to be re-evaluated according to the correct state of knowledge on the impact.”

He continued: “If [datacenters] are designed and properly built, they can be relatively quiet. On the other hand, if there is no consideration to the sound emissions from the facility, the facility can have impacts that are virtually catastrophic to the people nearby.”

Volume is measured in decibels, a logarithmic scale based on human hearing. It begins at the edge of auditory perception – zero. If a whisper is 30 decibels and a normal conversation is 60 decibels, it means the typical conversation is 1,000 times louder than the whisper. A rock band, at 100 decibels, is 1,000 times louder than the conversation.

A second dynamic of sound is its disruption of atmospheric pressure as it moves in waves. The frequency with which those waves cycle through the atmosphere per second is measured in hertz. Experts describe this as important for people living with the thrum of a nearby industrial facility, because low frequencies are known to travel long distances and can be experienced as vibration.

“Effects like hum, whooshing, whistling,” occur in “very narrow frequency bands in the low frequency range”, said Banks. “That noise … is coming right into people’s homes.”

Another plaintiff in the Vineland suit, Michael Gentile, 63, said he “found out it was a datacenter after I began to hear the noise”. He estimates he has called the county health department, responsible for enforcing noise ordinances, about “20 times”.

“I said, ‘I know you guys are testing for sound, but what about vibration?’ I said, ‘Can you feel that?’ I could feel it on my porch,” he said. “They don’t have any tools to do that. I said, ‘Well that doesn’t help me now.’”

In a statement to the Guardian, a DataOne spokesperson, Naomi Race, said the company was working to mitigate sound. The company, built “a northerly wall … as an additional layer to mitigate any sound from the construction site”; adjusted construction timing, said it would be using “quiet fuel cells to power the facility” and that it “retained the services of a sound mitigation specialist to assess the project site”. Race said the company was unable to comment on litigation, but that it was “committed to constructive dialogue, regulatory compliance, and being a valuable and responsible long-term member of the community”.

Nebius echoed DataOne. “In Vineland, we are working with DataOne to minimize impact, including measures to minimize noise and water use and ensure local residents don’t pay more for electricity … We remain committed to engaging openly with the Vineland community and being a responsible long-term partner,” the vice-president of public affairs, John Sutter, said in a statement.