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Turn About is Fair Play

At a city council meeting, someone opposing the construction of data centers played the loud noise emitted to the council members, who found this noise unbearable, but since they won't live next to the data center, they are still likely to approve the projects.

A fiscal court meeting in Carroll County, Kentucky grew contentious when local residents started playing the sound of a data center to county officials. Spoiler: they didn’t seem to like it.

As local news station WHAS11 reported last week, Carroll County is the planned location for two separate data center projects, each of which will likely be around 800 megawatts and will overtake hundreds of acres of Kentucky land. At that size, the data centers are considered hyperscalers.

“I believe they talked about 800 megawatts, so it is a hyperscale unit,” Scott Nab, a magistrate on the fiscal court, told WHAS11 of one of the projects. “It’ll be multiple buildings. It’ll spread over 1,000 acres when completed.”

As the news station notes, a data center of that size would consume the equivalent of 560,000 average homes.

Nab is among the data centers’ proponents, arguing that data is the industry of the future. Local residents of the rural region, however, are pushing back. One of their strategies? Subject county officials to the horrible, 24/7 screech that large data centers emit. 

This is not a bad