A data center opened next door. Then came the high-pitched whine.

STERLING, Virginia — Lindsay Shaw was happy when she found out a data center was going up 100 meters from her front door.

Unlike most of her neighbors, she preferred a supercomputing hub to a shopping mall, which might bring a crush of car traffic. She was even more pleased when she learned the data center would generate its own power — rather than connecting to the grid and driving up her electric bills.

But then the data center turned on, along with the eight natural gas turbines powering it. Now her home is barraged by a high-pitch whine that she says has made her newly screened-in porch unusable.

“We don’t want to be outside anymore,” said Shaw, a cybersecurity professional living in Loudoun County, one of the densest data center hotbeds on Earth. “A lot of people might see this as progress, like I did. But if it’s impacting you then you see, ‘Oh, that’s what it means for a data center to be in your community.’”

Shaw’s experience is a possible cautionary tale for President Donald Trump, who is pitching a new wave of data-center-specific power plants as the solution to easing voters’ anxieties about the economic costs of the artificial intelligence boom. A pledge he signed last Wednesday with leaders of Amazon, Google, OpenAI and other tech giants calls for data companies to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands,” while “paying the full cost of those resources.”

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