Ask about noise at Commissioners Court and you get the same answer every time: that’s what the abatement agreement is for — we’ll put conditions in it.
Six hundred people in Hood County tried to build an entire city from scratch because conditions were not enough. The company sued in federal court to stop the election.
Here is why.
Where the sound comes from
A large data center makes noise in three places: the cooling equipment, running continuously; the transformers that step grid power down for the building; and the backup generators, during testing.
The transformers are what people underestimate. A transformer hums because of magnetostriction — the iron core physically changes shape as the magnetic field cycles. On a 60 Hz grid that produces a tone at 120 Hz and its harmonics. It is constant, it has a definite pitch, and it never stops.
Low frequency and tonal. That is the worst combination there is: the hardest kind of noise to live beside, and the hardest to engineer away.
Why walls and setbacks do so little
Low-frequency sound bends around barriers. A 100 Hz tone has a wavelength of about 3.4 meters — longer than the wall you would build to stop it, so it diffracts around rather than reflecting off. A barrier delivering roughly 22 dB at 2,000 Hz delivers something closer to 8 dB at 100 Hz, and in the 63 Hz octave band conventional treatments have been found ineffective outright. Real barrier performance needs extreme heights and only shows up above about 1,000 Hz.
So a berm is not a partial fix for a hum. It strips out the frequencies that were already tolerable and leaves the one that isn’t.
It passes through houses more easily than high frequency does. Closing the windows filters the top of the spectrum and leaves the bottom. Which is why complaints about this noise are almost always complaints about sleep.
It barely fades with distance. Air absorbs high frequencies over distance and largely does not absorb low ones, so nearly all the reduction has to come from the sound spreading out. A few hundred feet is not a solution. The distances that genuinely help are measured in thousands of feet.
And a tone is worse than its level suggests. A pure tone is judged considerably more annoying than broadband noise carrying identical energy, because the ear locks onto a pitch and will not let go. The effect is strongest in quiet surroundings — which is to say, in most of Leon County.
How a facility can be compliant and still unlivable
Noise limits are almost always written in dBA — A-weighted decibels, which deliberately discount low frequencies because human hearing is less sensitive down there.
So a facility putting out a strong 120 Hz tone can sit comfortably inside a dBA limit while the people nearest it describe headaches and sleeplessness. Both things are true at once. That is a known failure of the measurement, not a dispute about the facts: assessing hum complaints takes octave-band and tonal analysis, not a single A-weighted average.
Texas inherits the flaw. Penal Code §42.01(a)(5) makes unreasonable noise near a private residence a criminal offense and presumes noise unreasonable above 85 decibels — one bare threshold, which a continuous hum can sit well beneath while making a house unlivable.
Which gives you the single most useful sentence on this page: a noise commitment written in dBA alone is not a noise commitment.
“We will make them use the right equipment”
You will hear this the moment the acoustics come up: that is exactly why we agree to these things before construction. We will make sure the right equipment gets selected.
Take that promise at its absolute best — assume good faith, assume it is written down — and it still does not reach the people it is offered to.
The tone is not an equipment defect. A transformer stepping grid power down at this scale hums at 120 Hz because iron changes shape in a cycling magnetic field. That is physics, not a product line. Enclosure and vibration isolation lower the level; they do not remove the tone, and the tone is the part that carries. There is no catalog page you can specify your way out of.
The one measure with real authority over low frequency is distance — thousands of feet, not hundreds. And distance is a siting decision. Siting is precisely what a Texas county cannot dictate, because it has no zoning authority over private land. The county can ask where the building goes. It cannot say.
So the promise is strongest exactly where it matters least. It can trim the margins for people a mile out, who were going to be fine, and it cannot do much of anything for the handful of families closest to the fence line — the ones whose houses this is supposedly protecting.
Then there are the two questions that apply to any condition, however carefully drafted.
Who checks? Somebody has to verify a 63 Hz octave-band level at the property line: with what instrument, how often, on whose budget, and who is qualified to read the result. If the answer is the company’s own consultant, the homework is self-graded. If there is no answer, the specification is not a condition — it is a sentence in a document.
What happens in year twelve? An abatement runs about ten years. A facility like this runs thirty or more and replaces its cooling plant along the way. The conditions lapse while the building keeps going, and nothing at all governs the equipment installed after they do.
The lever lasts a third as long as the problem.
And notice what the argument has quietly become. It started as the abatement is how we protect the neighbors. It ends as the abatement is how we obtain promises we cannot verify, about equipment that cannot fix the problem, which expire before the machinery they describe. Those are not the same claim, and only one of them is worth millions of dollars.
What the county can and cannot do
This part is genuinely constrained.
Texas counties cannot pass noise ordinances. A county has no general police power — it may exercise only authority the Constitution or the Legislature has handed it, and the Legislature has never handed counties authority over noise in unincorporated areas. The Texas State Law Library says so plainly: cities may regulate noise, counties must fall back on state criminal law outside city limits. Montgomery County publishes a notice telling residents the same thing.
What the county does have is that Penal Code provision, enforced by the sheriff. A blunt instrument with a threshold poorly matched to a hum — but it is real, it is free, and almost nobody knows it exists.
What nuisance law gives you
Here is the remedy that already exists, does not expire, and applies to everyone rather than to one company that signed something.
The Texas Supreme Court restated this area of law in Crosstex North Texas Pipeline v. Gardiner, 505 S.W.3d 580 (Tex. 2016) — a gas compressor station roaring like a jet engine next to a ranch. If you want a Texas precedent that maps onto an industrial hum beside rural property, that is the one.
“Nuisance” is an injury, not a claim. The Court held the word describes a type of legal injury — interference with the use and enjoyment of real property — rather than a cause of action. You do not sue “for nuisance”; you show conduct plus that injury.
The standard is substantial interference, judged objectively. A private nuisance substantially interferes with the use and enjoyment of land, causing unreasonable discomfort or annoyance to persons of ordinary sensibilities — not the most delicate neighbor on the road, and not something that bothers only you.
Three routes get you there: the condition was caused intentionally, negligently, or through an abnormally dangerous activity.
The remedies are damages, an injunction ordering the condition stopped or changed, and in some circumstances abating it yourself. The injunction is the one that matters, because it is the only mechanism on this entire page capable of making something quieter.
Texas also splits permanent from temporary nuisance, and the split carries real weight — it changes how damages are measured and when the filing clock starts. Put that question to a lawyer early rather than late.
What it costs to use it
I would rather not oversell this, so look at the bill.
In Granbury, MARA runs a bitcoin-mining operation at the Wolf Hollow gas facility. Neighbors organized as Citizens Concerned About Wolf Hollow and sued in 2024 with Earthjustice, describing sleep deprivation, severe migraines, tinnitus and dizziness from continuous noise and vibration. A Texas court denied MARA’s motion to dismiss in the summer of 2025, so the case is proceeding — and by that September the residents were still fighting to make the company hand over its own noise data.
Then there is the part that says the most about county authority. Those residents tried to incorporate a city, roughly six hundred people conjuring a municipality out of nothing, for the sole purpose of gaining a power a county does not have: passing a noise ordinance. MARA sued in federal court to stop the election.
That is what this remedy looks like from the inside. Years, lawyers, and a burden carried by the people harmed rather than by the government that approved the project.
What it means for the vote
A neighbor is not a party to an abatement agreement and cannot enforce a single line of it. Under Tax Code §312.205, the required remedy when a company misses a performance term is recapture of the abated taxes, plus penalty and interest. Money. The county collects and nothing gets quieter.
So an abatement can buy a quieter design. It cannot buy a remedy. With one or without one, the resident who cannot sleep ends up at the courthouse.
That is worth saying out loud before a vote, because it takes away the strongest emotional argument for granting the abatement — that this is how we protect the neighbors. It isn’t. It is how we pay for a design promise that expires, with revenue that would otherwise be uncapped and permanent.
And Leon County has already given ground here. The July 2026 rewrite of the abatement guidelines deleted the rule barring projects that create adverse impacts on adjacent properties — the one requirement that spoke to this directly.
Six questions to ask before a vote
These are not terms to request. They are a test of whether anyone has done the work, and most of them have no good answer.
- Are noise commitments written in octave bands with a tonal penalty, or at least in dBC, which keeps the low-frequency content dBA throws away? If it is dBA only, it does not address this problem.
- What is the modeled level at the nearest property line, at 63 Hz and 125 Hz specifically — not the A-weighted average?
- Are transformers enclosed and vibration-isolated, and what fan speeds are specified?
- What happens to any noise commitment when the equipment is replaced in year twelve?
- Who measures, how often, and who pays for it?
- What is the remedy if a limit is exceeded, and is it anything other than money?
If it is already happening
- Write it down. Dates, times, weather, what you were doing, what it stopped you doing. Contemporaneous notes carry weight that later recollection does not.
- Record it, consistently, from the same spot.
- Talk to a lawyer early. The permanent-versus-temporary question and the filing deadlines turn on facts that develop at the beginning.
- Call the sheriff on the Penal Code provision. It fits a hum badly, but a documented pattern of complaints is itself a record.
- Say it on the record at Commissioners Court, while there is still a vote in front of them.