Hum Sweet Hum

Gregory Pirio lives in a Northern Virginia neighborhood where you can hear a building that never turns off. It is a data center, and the machinery that keeps it from overheating runs every hour of every day, all year long. Neighbors say the high-pitched hum carries onto their decks and into their back yards, and one of them called it a disaster to put something like that near houses.

A data center is a warehouse packed with computers, and it is where the things you do online actually happen. If you asked an AI for help with homework this week, or watched anything at all on your phone, part of what you did ran through a building somebody else can hear all night. Northern Virginia alone has close to three hundred of them, and the newest ones need far more power and cooling than the older ones did, which means more fans, more generators, and more noise.

Nobody has written a national rulebook for how loud one of these is allowed to be, so towns are deciding one at a time. During 2026, residents in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Jersey gave up waiting and sued.

Your Task: Write the rules nobody has written yet.

1. The Where Rule
Write the rule for where a new data center is allowed to be built. People have suggested next to highways, out in farmland, or deep underground. Then give one good thing and one bad thing about the place you picked. (Your rule, plus one pro and one con.)

2. The Already There Rule
Hundreds of these are already sitting near neighborhoods and they are not moving. Write the rule those ones have to follow, whether that is a wall, a noise limit, quiet hours, or something else entirely. (1 to 2 sentences.)