A Michigan Mom Told JD Vance Her Data Center Neighbour Sounds Like a Vacuum. He Told Her About Louisiana
At a CBS town hall, a Dowagiac resident described round-the-clock noise from the data center across her street. The vice president's answer covered teacher bonuses, power bills and China.
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The AI boom has mostly been discussed in big numbers: gigawatts, billions of dollars in capital spending, chips by the hundred thousand. At a CBS News town hall with Vice President JD Vance this week, it was discussed in a much smaller unit: one family’s back yard.
The question
Lindy Valenzuela lives in Dowagiac, Michigan, directly across the street from a data center. She told Vance that for years her family had lived with constant noise from the site. Being outdoors became “unbearable,” she said, and the yard turned into “a useless patch of grass that we could look at but not enjoy.” Even with the windows shut, the buzzing could be heard day and night. “It was like having a vacuum in our living room,” she said, adding that it had taken a class action lawsuit, in which she is a plaintiff, for the problem to finally be addressed.
The host said the town hall had received more questions about data centers than any other topic, many from self-identified Trump voters.
The answer
Vance said he cared about communities like hers and that data centers “can be good” but can also, “as in your case, cause real problems.” His principle, he said, is that they have to be “good community members.” He pointed to a data center in Louisiana where local teachers are set to receive $50,000 bonuses funded by data center revenue, and to the administration’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which he said requires data centers to commit to being good citizens before they move into a community. He called a $300 jump in a household power bill “totally unacceptable,” and argued the US needs the computing capacity because China wants to win the technology race.
All of that may be true. None of it is about noise. The bonuses are in Louisiana, the pledge he described is mainly about electricity bills, and the problem in Dowagiac is a high-pitched hum that neighbours told Detroit station WXYZ runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
What the lawsuit says
According to MLive, the facility at 415 E. Prairie Ronde St. is a 30-megawatt data center operated by Alliance Cloud Services, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data Inc. The proposed class action, filed on May 26 in federal court for the Western District of Michigan, alleges that neighbouring properties are being “physically invaded” by “excessive noise” from the cooling systems that keep the servers from overheating, and that the company failed to install adequate soundproofing. Residents also say the noise hurts their home values. Hyperscale Data has announced plans to expand the site to 340 megawatts, although MLive reported that no development requests had been submitted to the city.
Why it matters beyond Michigan
Politicians of both parties are selling data centers as jobs, tax revenue and national security. Residents increasingly judge them on things that never appear in an investor presentation: fans, water, traffic and the power bill. Promises about teacher bonuses in another state do not help a family that cannot open its windows. If the industry wants to keep building near homes, the cheapest fix may be the least glamorous one: better soundproofing, written into planning approvals before the first server rack goes in.
The Daily Snark’s commentary is based on public reporting linked above.