The Invisible Trillion · The Highway in the Bronx

What Living Next To One Is Like

Brittany Heights is a neighborhood in Chandler, Arizona. Until 2014 it was a quiet residential development — backyards, barbecues, the normal sounds of suburbia, rising property values, kids on bikes. In late 2014, a data center came in next door. The construction took most of a year, and residents tolerated it, because construction ends. Then the data center came online, and they discovered that what comes after construction is not quiet.

It is the continuous low-frequency hum of the cooling system, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. As one resident put it, it is “like living with your refrigerator running, except the refrigerator is the size of a Costco and you can’t unplug it.”

They tried earplugs, noise-canceling headphones indoors, white noise machines, sleeping on the far side of the house, planting trees as a sound barrier. They wrote letters and came to council meetings. The complaints went nowhere, because Chandler’s noise ordinance — like most municipal noise ordinances in America — was written for block parties and barking dogs, not 24-hour industrial cooling. Measured by the standard method, the data center’s noise came in below the legal threshold.

That word — threshold — is doing a lot of work, and we will come back to it. For now: the city had no legal basis to act, the operator had no incentive to change anything, and the residents had no recourse. They had complained correctly, to the correct authorities, using the correct procedures, and the system told them, in effect, that what they were experiencing was not a problem it was equipped to recognize.

Some moved away — the ones who could afford to. After eight years of organizing that produced media coverage, lawsuits, and political pressure, Chandler amended its zoning in 2022 to make new data centers harder to site, and in 2025 the council voted unanimously against a proposed one, citing Brittany Heights. The original data center is still there. The hum is still there.

That is the longest-running documented case, but it is not unique. In Bristow, Virginia, Donna Gallant installed triple-pane windows in her home next to Google’s “Mango Farm” complex; the sound still penetrates her bedroom walls, and during load testing — when cooling systems cycle to maximum at unpredictable intervals — she has described anxiety attacks and sleepless nights. “It literally rocks your core,” she told a U.S. News reporter in April 2026. There are thousands of people like her in Loudoun and Prince William counties, the world’s largest data center cluster — nearly 300 facilities in roughly thirty square miles. Most of them lived in their houses before the data centers existed.

In South Memphis, in the historically Black neighborhood of Boxtown, residents have been breathing exhaust from gas turbines installed by Elon Musk’s xAI to power its Colossus supercomputer. Reporting and the subsequent legal filings describe turbines installed in 2024 without the air permits the Clean Air Act requires for major emission sources; the company’s position was that the turbines were “temporary” and therefore exempt, a reading the EPA has rejected.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the Memphis NAACP, filed a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act in 2025; xAI then removed most of the turbines and obtained permits for the remainder, and said the facility would be “the lowest emitting of its kind in the country.” A subsequent federal lawsuit filed by the NAACP and Earthjustice in April 2026 concerns a further set of turbines installed across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, to power a second facility in the predominantly Black Whitehaven neighborhood.

According to that complaint, the turbines have the potential to emit, per year, on the order of 1,700 tons of nitrogen oxides, 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde. The litigation is ongoing, and the company disputes aspects of the residents’ characterization. What is not in dispute is the shape of the situation: emissions are being produced near homes, schools, and churches; the chatbot the facility trains is used by people who live nowhere near Memphis; and the economic benefit and the air-quality burden land in very different places.

The list goes on. In Aurora, Illinois, residents organized against a CyrusOne facility, telling ABC7 Chicago in 2026 that they were not adequately informed before approval. In Warrenton, Virginia, residents have organized against a proposed Amazon Web Services facility, having watched Amazon’s existing Prince William County data centers generate thousands of noise complaints. Across essentially every state with significant data center development, at least one neighborhood is organizing against impacts that residents never agreed to host.

These are the people the next two chapters are about.

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