The most-cited data center noise case in the country began as a Bitcoin mine.

That will read to some people as an industry wriggling out of something, so the part that comes first. The noise in Dowagiac, Michigan is real, it has gone on for years, and the people on Louise Avenue are describing a genuine loss. Whatever is in the building, it is across the street from them and it changed how they live. Nothing below argues they are mistaken.

The Neighbors Describe Something Specific

In May 2026, the Detroit firm Liddle Sheets P.C. filed a federal class action in the Western District of Michigan on behalf of residents living within one mile of the facility. The named plaintiff, Lindy Valenzuela, put it plainly in the complaint: "My husband and I have been unable to use our yard since this facility began operating. It is impossible to stay outside for longer than 10 minutes at a time before succumbing to headaches. The noise also penetrates the inside of our house even with the windows closed."

Neighbors interviewed on camera reach for the same comparison: a vacuum cleaner with a clogged filter, left running in the living room, and nobody comes back to turn it off.

Rick Neitzel, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan, called this an unprecedented new noise source arriving in a lot of communities. Community noise at high enough levels is associated with high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute documented the same pattern in a 2026 report: headaches, sleep disruption and constant low-frequency hum in places where the local ordinance had been written for backyard parties. Low-frequency sound is the specific problem. It travels further, it passes through walls that stop everything else, and an average reading at the property line can pass a standard while the thing people are complaining about goes unmeasured.

The complaint's central allegation is not that a data center is inherently loud. It is that this operator "failed to implement adequate soundproofing equipment at its Data Center that properly absorbs, captures, and/or prevents the escape of noise," and that a properly built and maintained facility would have done otherwise. The lawyers are arguing that the noise was a choice.

They are right that it was a choice. The interesting question is who was making it, and on what basis.

The Building Was a Bitcoin Mine

The facility is owned by Alliance Cloud Services LLC, a subsidiary of Hyperscale Data, Inc., based in Las Vegas. It was built to mine Bitcoin.

In 2024, the company, then operating as Ault Alliance, announced that it would move mining operations to a facility in Montana and expand the Michigan site to support artificial intelligence, with ambitions of up to 300 megawatts of capacity. Residents date the arrival of the mining operation to around 2021 and the round-the-clock noise to 2024. In September 2026 the company's CEO told a Dowagiac council meeting that roughly half the mining equipment was already offline and the rest would follow within three months.

The operation that generated years of complaints, an ordinance, a citation and a federal lawsuit was a cryptocurrency mine for the entire period in question. The words "data center" arrived in the coverage before the compute did.

Mining Halls and Compute Halls Cool Themselves Differently

A Bitcoin mining hall is a room full of application-specific chips whose only job is to run flat out. They tolerate heat, dust and humidity that would be unacceptable around enterprise compute, so the cheapest cooling works: pull outside air across the machines and push it out the other side. Individual ASIC miners run in the range of 75 to 76 decibels each, and a hall full of them reads in the 80s and 90s. The exhaust fans are frequently mounted on the outside of the container or building, which puts the loudest component of the whole operation on the property line rather than inside it.

A compute facility cannot run that way. The hardware demands tighter environmental control: contained air paths, sealed halls, and increasingly liquid cooling delivered to the chip. Those systems are quieter as a byproduct of being precise, and attenuation is added on top, acoustic walls, inward-facing mechanical yards, low-speed fans, and setbacks negotiated at the permit stage.

Attenuation is not free. Sound-deadening equipment adds construction and maintenance cost, and adds resistance to the airflow path, which requires stronger fans and raises the power bill for the life of the building. Every decibel removed is paid for twice.

The Economics Decide the Decibels

A mining operation's margin is the spread between the electricity it buys and the coin it earns. It has no customers to lose, no tenant to satisfy, no service level agreement, and no second site waiting on a permit from the same county. Attenuation is pure cost against a thin and volatile margin. The rational operator, purely on the economics, does not buy it.

A hyperscaler or colocation operator has the opposite position. It will be back before a planning commission within the year, its customers ask about community relations in procurement questionnaires, and it signs development agreements where a violation is a permit problem rather than an inconvenience. Sound mitigation is cheap insurance on a much larger asset.

This is not a claim that every data center is quiet and every mine is loud. There are quiet mines, built by operators who spent the money, and the Bitcoin industry has argued for years that mining noise is a solved engineering problem when anyone decides to solve it. There are badly sited data centers too, and Northern Virginia and Chandler have spent years dealing with them. The point is narrower: the incentive to spend money on quiet runs in opposite directions, and the label on the building tells you nothing about which set of incentives applied.

Dowagiac Did What Communities Are Told to Do

In March 2026, the city adopted its first industrial noise ordinance, setting a daytime limit of 65 decibels and a nighttime limit of 55. The city manager says the facility has been cited for violating it. The company is challenging both the readings and the methodology behind them.

That is the sequence every community is advised to follow. Write the standard, measure, enforce. Dowagiac did all three and the result so far is a dispute about instrumentation.

The expansion followed the same pattern. In March the company secured an agreement to buy 48.5 acres, more than doubling its land in the city. On April 1, Mayor Patrick Bakeman wrote an open letter to the company's CEO noting that it had neither applied for nor received the approvals its expansion would require. In May the company announced strong customer interest in the Michigan campus and expected lease agreements in the coming months.

A community told the process will protect it, then watching that process become a disagreement about decibel meters while the site doubles in size, has learned something. Every room this gets discussed in now carries that lesson.

The Label Is About to Become Accurate

Here is the part that cuts against the argument this piece is making.

If the pivot happens as described, that building will hold AI compute. Same shell, same site, same neighbors, and quite possibly a good deal of the same cooling infrastructure, because retrofitting a hall built for open-air mining into a contained compute environment is expensive and nobody has published a plan. At that point it is a data center by any definition anyone uses, and Louise Avenue will have been right about the name all along.

Which is the reason to fix the question now. "Is it a data center" is not useful to a community. It is a category with enormous variation inside it and no standard attached to the words.

What to Ask Instead

The questions that separate a Dowagiac from a quiet neighbor are all answerable before approval.

What is the cooling design, specifically: outside air, contained, or liquid to the chip. That one answer predicts most of the sound.

Where are the fans and the mechanical yard relative to the nearest homes, and do they face in or out.

What is the projected sound level at the property line at full load, in writing, and what happens when it is exceeded.

Is there a nighttime limit separate from the daytime one, and does it cover low-frequency sound or only an average.

Who is the operator, what else have they built, and can the city call someone whose job it is to answer.

And the one Dowagiac earned the hard way: if the project expands or changes what it does inside the building, does that trigger another review.

The Honest Frame

The residents of Louise Avenue are not wrong about their lives. The lawyers are not wrong that the noise was preventable. The city is not wrong to have written an ordinance. And the reporters covering it are not being careless in any way that is unusual, because the company itself is named Hyperscale Data.

What is wrong is the inference being drawn from it, which is that this is what a data center sounds like. What Dowagiac heard for years was a cryptocurrency mine, built at the lowest cost that would function, by an operator with no reason to care about the property line and no plans to come back for another permit. That is a real category of facility, it is arriving in a lot of small towns, and communities should absolutely be warned about it.

They should be warned about it accurately, because the protection against it is specific. Not a ban on data centers, which would not have stopped this building, but a sound limit at the property line with a nighttime standard, written into the approval, enforceable, and attached to any change of use. Dowagiac is most of the way there and got there late. Everywhere else still has the chance to do it early.

Sources

Related reading: Do Data Centers Hurt Property Values? - What a Data Center Means for My Town - The Building With No Windows