When the Datacenter Is Too Loud for the Neighborhood
Brainerd’s new ordinance shows what happens when infrastructure meets local fear
They say data has no borders, but fans do. Fans have decibels. Fans have bearings that rattle after a few months of spinning at full tilt.
And in Brainerd, Minnesota, the people have heard enough.
This isn’t a story about hyperscale. It’s not about sovereign AI or tiered latency zones. It’s about a city that looked out at its light industrial park, heard the howl of another crypto box booting up next to the water treatment plant, and decided to redraw the line between public peace and private compute.
On May 5, Brainerd passed an ordinance that doesn’t ban datacenters—but it does everything short of that. No standalone facilities. No third-party leasing. No operations over 10% of a building’s footprint. And no, you can’t drop a pod in an empty field and call it AI innovation. If you want racks, they’d better be serving your own enterprise workloads—and you’d better convince someone it’s ancillary to a real business.
This isn’t NIMBYism. This is NIMEPI—Not In My Electrical or Psychological Infrastructure. Because the problem isn’t just noise. It’s that datacenters—especially crypto and AI edge clusters—have become architecture without neighbors. They show up uninvited, draw megawatts from substations built for schools and supermarkets, and hum loudly enough to fray the sonic fabric of small towns trying to keep their property taxes low and their windows open in the summer.
So Brainerd didn’t say no. It said: only if. Only if your datacenter lives quietly under someone else’s zoning category. Only if it doesn’t try to be infrastructure for anyone else. Only if it pretends to be part of something smaller.
It’s a fragile precedent, but it’s not isolated. As AI demand climbs and distributed compute grows noisier, we’re going to see more towns write laws at the edge of technical comprehension. Not because they hate technology—but because they’re not convinced infrastructure respects the places it lands.
And maybe they’re right. Maybe if you want your datacenter to be welcomed, you have to stop building it like it doesn’t care where it lives.
