Americans on alert as noisy data centres near their neighbourhoods

A data centre complex in Prince William County, Virginia, sits near the Great Oak community, seen in October 2022. — Handout via Thomson Reuters Foundation

WASHINGTON: When a global data centre company moved into an old solar panel factory just outside Portland, Oregon, three years ago, it was surrounded by farmland and open space.

Today, it is encircled by newly built data centres – vast warehouses accommodating the digital storage, applications and processing that power swathes of the Internet.