Infrasound from Data Centers: The Silent Noise Debate Dividing Communities

As the data center boom pressures counties, cities, and towns into fights over noise, the trickiest tone local officials are starting to hear complaints about is one they can’t even hear—a low-frequency rumble known as infrasound.

Infrasound is a phenomenon best described as sounds so low, they’re inaudible. These are the sorts of vibrations and pressure at the heart of earthquakes and volcanic activity. Infrasound can be anything from the waves shot out from a sonic boom or an explosion to very minute changes in air pressure around HVAC systems or refrigerators.

Knowing some of these facilities also have the capacity to produce significant audible noise, growing segments of the population’s more tech-skeptical and health-anxious corners are fretting some data centers could be making a lot of infrasound, too. The whizzing of so many large computational machines combined with cooling fans and other large devices creating so many new columns of air flow. Add onto that any rotational onsite power generation—think natural gas turbines, for example—and you get quite a lot of movement that could potentially produce what they say is infrasound.

Some of the virality of this chatter about infrasound and data centers comes from a video about infrasound created by audio engineer and researcher Benn Jordan. Currently sitting at more than 1 million views, this short YouTube film documents claims that some data centers are operating like “acoustic weapons” through infrasound and harming people.

Andy Masley, an “effective altruist” writer, has become the chief critic of the Jordan video, getting into a back-and-forth that’s raised the issue to Internet discourse territory.

The Infrasound Debate: Science, Skepticism, and Public Health

The Jordan-Masley infrasound debate is honestly a bit of a mess. So I want to be clear: I’m not going to get into the science of whether or not infrasound poses any kind of public health risk in this article. We can get to that later. It’s worth saying that this subject may need more study and that work is ongoing.

Also, talking about infrasound at all can make you honestly sound a little wacky (see: this study blaming people seeing ghosts on infrasound). It might also remind you of another panic in the Electric Age: electromagnetic fields, also known as EMFs. Developers of transmission lines and solar projects have long had to deal with people worried about transmission lines and large electrical equipment potentially glowing with invisible, unhealthy radiation.

In late 2024, I wrote about how an RFK Jr. supporter worried about this form of electrical emission was helping lead the fight against a transmission line in New Jersey for offshore wind. Maybe that’s why it didn’t surprise me one bit when the Health and Human Services secretary himself told a U.S. Senate Committee last week that he was asking the Surgeon General’s office to “do either meta reviews” or “base studies” on noise pollution and EMF radiation from data centers “so we can better inform the American public.”

“There’s a range of injuries that are very, very well documented. They’re neurological—very, very grave.”