Datacenters have a public image problem, industry confesses to The Reg
- Reference: 1749127025
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/05/datacenters_have_a_public_image/
- Source link:
[People are] saying, 'How can we decide to put datacenters everywhere? We don't want them.' But the same people use that for, you know, their videos on Tiktok
How to improve the public image and acceptability of data facilities was a hot topic at the [1]Datacloud Global Congress held this week in Cannes, France.
"We have communities that don't want us there," complained Val Walsh Microsoft's VP for Cloud Operations & Innovation. "We still have this lack of alignment from the general public as to why datacenters are needed, because they don't quite connect the fact that their entire life runs through datacenters."
"So they still have this negative connotation, like, my mother would be like, 'ooh, the datacenter, it's in the newspapers in Dublin.' Drives me crazy. But, you know, it's a fact that 80 percent of the population don't understand them," she added, referring to the controversy over bit barns in Ireland, where the monolithic structures consumed [2]more than a fifth of the country's electricity during 2023.
The conference dedicated an entire panel session to the topic, asking how we got here, and what to do about it.
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Emma Fryer, Public Policy Director for datacenter operator CyrusOne, said there are 3 main myths: that the internet runs by magic; datacenters do nothing useful, and they can be built anywhere.
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"People don't make a connection between the digital services they depend on every minute of every day of their lives and the fact that providing those every minute of every day of their lives requires industrial scale infrastructure," she said.
It was generally felt there is a need for education so the public is better informed about what bit barns actually do and the applications and industries that depend upon them. This could backfire, however, especially if emphasis is placed on the importance of datacenters for AI.
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"Most people are f**king scared of AI, like we're feeding a monster," said Garry Connolly , founder of Digital Infrastructure Ireland. Telling the public that we need massive datacenters for AI elicits a response of "Oh, that thing is going to take my job - I'm really winning hearts and minds there," he added.
Connolly's suggests the industry takes a step back and gets people to think of bit barns as utilities, just as much as water and electricity supplies are.
"Does anybody ever think about the reservoir when they turn on the tap? Do they ever think about the substation when they turn on the light? No, why? Because anything that's there when you're born is not technology," he claimed.
Water water everywhere...
One obvious flaw The Reg can see with that approach is people are clearly aware of how essential water is, but NIMBYism means they still don't want a reservoir built where they live, as anyone in the south of England can attest.
Phillip Marangella, chief marketing & product officer for datacenter biz EdgeConneX said his company had seen pushback in one particular market, where the local community, according to Marangella, had a lot of misperceptions.
Most datacenters don't have PR issues, but hyperscale level DCs and the new AI Factory datacenters certainly do, and the shift from <10kW per rack for typical enterprise workloads, to currently about 150kW per rack for AI solutions, and ramping up to 600kW per rack in the 2027 timeframe certainly is becoming an issue
"We were taking their power, we were going to pollute the water, going to raise the prices of power, all these kinds of things, right?" Marangella said, "So I told them about the benefits, that we work with the power company and we're investing in our own power," he added.
But perhaps the industry has found a better way to deal with public opposition, and that is to get the political leaders onside.
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"You have to get inside the heads of policy makers," said Connolly.
"We are very proactive at talking to government," stated Fryer. "Specifically in the UK, where I've had the closest government engagement, it's actually been a huge benefit that a bespoke department has been set up to cover technology, and we have a very privileged conversation with that department, and our part of the social contract with the department is that we speak truth to power."
Andy Buss, research director for analyst IDC's European Enterprise Infrastructure program told us a few weeks back: "Most datacenters don't have PR issues, but hyperscale level DCs and the new AI Factory datacenters certainly do, and the shift from <10kW per rack for typical enterprise workloads, to currently about 150kW per rack for AI solutions, and ramping up to 600kW per rack in the 2027 timeframe certainly is becoming an issue.
How datacenters use water – and why kicking the habit is nearly impossible [8]READ MORE
"It is eating up additional power, often taking the new renewable capacity that has been added to the grid. AI providers will need to contribute to capacity expansion and grid resilience as part of their buildout strategy moving forwards."
He added: "These gigawatt class datacenters can also have major destabilizing effects on the local power distribution when workloads start or stop. But AI can also decrease greenhouse gas emissions or lower overall emissions at a company level, so this also has to be factored in to the business case but also the discussion on the impact of energy-dense AI factories on the environment."
Fabrice Coquio, SVP and Managing Director for France, Digital Realty, agreed there had been a change in mindset, noting "if I take the example of the AI summit organized by President Macron, on one hand, it was very positive, explaining to any mayor in the country or any authority that datacenters were essential as an infrastructure like roads or ports or airports or whatever.
[9]Meta just saved an Illinois nuclear plant that was set to be mothballed
[10]CoreWeave signs megalease at Applied Digital's not-so-little house on the prairie
[11]Musk's smog-belching Colossus datacenter slammed by civil rights group
[12]Dell has $14BN AI server backlog, warns projects are 'nonlinear'
"At the same time, it created a some fear in the population... what are datacenters and what's the purpose of [them], and saying, 'How can we decide to put datacenters everywhere? We don't want them.' But the same people use [datacenters] for, you know, their videos on Tiktok.
He added: "Also, this is an industry which never requested any subsidies from any party, so maybe the lobbying part of the business was a bit ignored, and we have to explain, explain and explain what it is, what it is, why it is needed, and how to do that in a conscious concept of our sustainability and impact."
Pablo Ruiz Escribano, SVP of Schneider's Secure Power & Datacenter Business told The Reg as an industry, bitbarn builders "haven't been able to explain how critical this is, this infrastructure is for the society today, and how we have benefited the society during these last five years through COVID, been able to facilitate people to work from home, to connect with their families that were confined, through online calls to manage our kids watching TV through Netflix and to boost the online shopping.
"So I don't think we've done a great job on explaining to the society how critical is a datacenter to keep our current life, and we haven't been able to explain how critical the datacenter is to avoid to create a massive IT infrastructure that is inefficient at all."
Escribano said the industry is fairly new, and from the "beginning, we've been obsessed about energy efficiency and about using and utilizing renewable synergies to run the datacenters. The datacenter industry is not that old. If you look at the vast majority of datacenters in Europe they are not older than five to ten years. The [United] States started earlier. It's a big opportunity to refresh, for sure. You apply new cooling equipment, which represents half of the energy consumption, if you renew ... this cooling unit, [and] buy new ones, definitely, you bring in a lot of efficiency in there.
Cloudy with a chance of GPU bills: AI's energy appetite has CIOs sweating [13]READ MORE
"We're working with customers like DLR to refresh existing aging infrastructure, whether ... it's a new UPS or equivalent... supporting our customers on upgrading and updating these infrastructures. "Electricity usage is going up, but overall it remains the same ratio. So that means that data has increased, the use of data has increased, but we've been able to decouple the usage of data from the energy consumption. That shows that the datacenter industry cares about the impact on energy consumption.
"What we're saying is that, for sure, AI will be demanding more capacity or more power supply, for sure, but still, we have quite a lot of power availability in the different markets."
Escribano spoke about power distribution problem more generally, saying that "the investments on the grid has to follow the demand. Today, the cycles for the Grid Investment are longer than [those for builders of] the datacenter. That means that in order to really make sure that the grid is stable and is able to cope with the future demand... we need some investments on the grid. You know – before letting new datacenters to be built in those areas?"
Notably, the current UK government has "streamlined" the planning process for datacenter developers since it came into power last year, classing them as [14]Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and introducing an [15]AI Opportunities Action Plan earlier this year that will see the formation of "AI Growth Zones" based around datacenters.
Meanwhile, CyrusOne's Fryer said her firm had commissioned a survey into what communities think, and claimed it found that 93 percent of respondents felt either positive or neutral about datacenters after all. CyrusOne interviewed 13,000 people across seven European markets it is involved in, she claimed. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.datacloudglobalcongress.com/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/ireland_datacenter_power_consumption/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aEG_CbP5ui9jtSu596I5VgAAAQw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEG_CbP5ui9jtSu596I5VgAAAQw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEG_CbP5ui9jtSu596I5VgAAAQw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEG_CbP5ui9jtSu596I5VgAAAQw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/04/how_datacenters_use_water/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/03/meta_signs_20year_nuclear_deal/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/02/coreweave_applied_digital_nd/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/02/naacp_musk_dc/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/30/dell_results/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/29/public_cloud_ai_alternatives/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/17/objections_to_datacenter_builds_cni/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/13/uk_government_ai_plans/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I think it's probably more to do with the entertainment (Film/TV/SciFi) industry churning out 'AI is bad' stories that have seeped into the public subconscious.
I asked then to stop but they just said "Sorry, I can't do that ...... Dave"!
Or it's because we've had ample examples of science giving us some miracle thing only to discover there's a hefty cost. Take Chloro-Fluro-Carbon as an example: Miracle refrigerant. Just a shame about the environmental impact when it leaked.
Or look at all the wind farms in Scotland: Great, but the grid can't cope with all that power when they're running to capacity so sites get paid not to produce power, at public expense, and now we've got fights over 'wind theft' to contend with, too!
So is it really a surprise that people look at the latest thing and wonder: Do we really need all this now, or should we go a little slower and only build to what we need now plus a little extra to handle growth for, say, the next five to ten years? Only I know darn well the argument then is 'but we don't know what that'll be like and we need to go big in case'... but the people don't see that: They see another carbuncle being erected, making a mess and disrupting lives: Too much change, too quickly, and with a view that it is just another vanity project or a wagon for people to jump on only to be an utter waste of time and effort, leaving another abandoned eye sore to blot the landscape.
Plus: Do they really need to be built on greenbelt? Sure, it's cheaper, but shouldn't they be forced to build on brown belt and without the subsidies the government inevitably offers as incentives? It's not like that ever gets abused, is it? No examples of, say, companies building cars and pre-registering them just to make it look like sales are up so they can claim subsidies (if you've seen those reports) or the mountain of e-bikes in China from start ups that go as far as ordering the bikes, getting the government grant, to just abandon everything (except the money) to rot...
The real function of these projects isn’t infrastructure - it’s optics.
Politicians don’t subsidise datacentres because they’re needed. They do it because it lets them point at a field full of air conditioning units and say: "Look, investment. Progress. Jobs.”
Doesn’t matter that the jobs are minimal, pay is shite, the power’s gone, and the land’s ruined. What matters is the staged photo op, the press release, and a new bullet point on a re-election campaign.
These datacentres aren’t being built for the public - they’re being built on the public. The taxpayer funds them, the community lives with the fallout, and the profits vanish offshore.
Cry me a river.
Amazing how the datacenter execs gathered to whinge about NIMBYism without once acknowledging the obvious: people don’t want datacenters because they don’t benefit from them.
These hyperscale bit barns don’t host community projects or serve local needs - they’re energy-guzzling, water-hungry fortresses for Big Tech to hoard compute, automate layoffs, and extract value from everyone else's data.
The irony is rich: billionaires want sympathy because their profit engines are unpopular, while those same facilities push up electricity prices, suck public infrastructure dry, and offer nothing in return except faster surveillance and monetised dopamine loops.
You’re not building "public utilities." You’re building private infrastructure for private gain, propped up by public subsidies and political lobbying.
The public gets it just fine. That’s exactly why they don’t want you in their backyards.
Re: Cry me a river.
These hyperscale bit barns don’t host community projects or serve local needs - they’re energy-guzzling, water-hungry fortresses for Big Tech to hoard compute, automate layoffs, and extract value from everyone else's data.
That's the crux of it. DC's are important. Our modern world is built on digital services. Even our phones are mostly VOIP now. But this gold rush for 150kW racks to power AI workloads is not actually benefitting anyone. Sure, we see reports that tech vacancies are up, with people hiring AI-"specialists". But how much of that is down to actual business and how much is it execs stuffing some money into "AI" because of FOMO. Sure, I'd rather see the cash go out in salaries than as a stock-buyback or dividend. But it's not actually generating value or product . And really, these massive AI datacentres don't benefit locals (or anyone really) the way a telco datacentres does (which is legit utility infrastructure).
But it's all part of the act - muddy the waters that "Datacentres are essential infrastructure". When the truth is that Some DC are essential infrastructure. Some are luxuries, and we should be more discriminating in which luxuries we indulge in.
You know what would be an amazing concept? A community data centre. A room with some mesh-fronted lockers run by a non-profit CIC who has some IPs and a 1-10Gb backhaul. For a network provider like CityFibre, the traffic would be mostly upload and therefore free (since their customer traffic is going to be heavily download). So if you were reasonably on-network geographically, then they should be able to charge a fairly sensible monthly connection fee. Basically a step up from a well-organised hackspace.
You get a power socket and ethernet port in your locker and that's that. You can drop in a couple of RPis, an HP Microserver, whatever. £20/mo, done. All to the benefit of the local community for local workloads.
If the power goes off, you lose connectivity for a while. But does that actually matter? At my first proper job (late 2000s), our public website and customer portal was run on a Dell tower server in the office hanging off an SDSL line. Which part of our infrastructure represented a single point of failure? All of it. The server, the crappy 5-port 100Mb unmanaged switch, the dreadful BT router... I had most faith in the cabling - because I crimped that Cat5 myself.
That wouldn't be tenable today given the growth of that company. But for lots of firms or enthusiasts... it'd probably be fine? How much are we paying for 5x9s hosting when really "available most of the time we're awake" is sufficient. (See also: [1]Low Tech Magazine ). There's a fair case to be made that modern DCs have excellent PUE values and are more efficient. It's possibly also the case that distributing our compute to smaller on-prem deployments can be cheaper and offer better experiences to local (LAN) users.
Not everything needs to be K8s in AWS with 99.999% reliability, because at the end of the day - most of those big boys go to sleep occasionally as well when they drop a region from their routing table or fudge their BGP.
For a lot of people, what I've described is enough. They don't need to pay £nnn/mo for a quarter or half rack. But as it stands, if you're not at that point, then you're directed to spin up some VMs with a hyperscaler. I suppose that concept is undercut by the fact most domestic lines these days have at least 20Mb upload, which is fine for most "self-hosting" situations, provided you can get a static IP.
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
"Because they don't quite connect the fact that their entire life runs through datacenters."
How much of that is due to the advertising industrial complex and now AI? If it weren't for those two things, there'd be a lot less data about everyone in data centres.
And...
"But AI can also decrease greenhouse gas emissions or lower overall emissions at a company level"
Bullshit.
Or...
...people don't want unreliable electricity supplies and risk of drought to shovel money into billionaires pockets
Stupid clever people
Classic IQ vs EQ problem.
How is it news that everyone wants the nice bits of something without having to suffer the consequences of that nice thing?
I want decent roads, but I don't want to pay the tax to make them decent.
I want a stable electricity supply, but I don't want any power stations or distribution network disturbing my view.
We live in a world where the gap in understanding between production and consumption is so vast that I'm bewildered that supposedly clever people are surprised.
Re: Stupid clever people
This isn't about people whining that “they want the benefits without the consequences.” It’s about the fact that the consequences are local, and the benefits are global - and mostly captured by a handful of trillion-dollar companies.
Your roads analogy would work if these datacentres served the public the way roads do. But they don’t. They serve hedge funds, adtech, and job-eating AI.
Communities aren’t confused freeloaders. They’re rightly pissed off at being asked to sacrifice land, water, and grid capacity for infrastructure that makes companies like Google richer while giving them nothing back but higher bills and surveillance.
So no, this isn’t an IQ vs EQ problem. It’s about exploitation. The public sees it clearly: they get the noise, the water shortages, and the power drain; tech giants get the profits, the subsidies, and the AI arms race. No amount of smug analogies is going to cover that up.
Re: Stupid clever people
Yes exactly. The DC-builder mouthpiece says "But people don't understand that these bitbarns power their TikTok videos" when actually, the world would be a much better place without TikTok, so what useful purpose do these energy-glugging barns serve again?
"People think they can be built anywhere but they can't" - They CAN be built anywhere, except when they are serving the high-frequency traders, who are the reason the stock market goes to hell after every fart that comes out of Trump's arse. They cream off the top and we all know it's a zero-sum game, so the loser is your pension fund. What useful purpose do these bitbarns serve again?
Re: Stupid clever people
The bitbarns have the same usefulness as the AI LLM's running on the kit inside.
give useful/wanted examples
Show a picture of a data center with typical uses. That rack contains your isp email,that rack contains Netflix movies,that rack contains BBC radio/iplayer. Realistically it will be more boring such as company xyz data. Arguably government databases are important ( I couldn't sell that sorry). If people can relate to what it contains they maybe more tolerant.
Re: give useful/wanted examples
Show a picture of a data center with typical uses. That rack contains your isp email,that rack contains Netflix movies,that rack contains BBC radio/iplayer. Realistically it will be more boring such as company xyz data. Arguably government databases are important ( I couldn't sell that sorry). If people can relate to what it contains they maybe more tolerant.
The problem being that they can't do that - and they know it. The bulk of these new DCs are going up for AI because old DCs can't support the per-rack power/cooling demands. If they were doing something genuinely useful like "here's your email", then yes, people would be tolerant. But they're being asked to watch greenfield sites get paved into GW-scale bitbarns (plus gensets & ancillary infrastructure), and to give up their water supplies for evaporative cooling (and somewhere to dump the toxic brine), all in pursuit of a chatbot that lies sporadically.
And for (the island of) Ireland in particular this is a touchy subject. Loch Neagh is still in the grip of [1]total ecosystem collapse . Turns out the 2023 algal outbreak, collapse of the eel fisheries and subsequent wetland-bird population crisis wasn't just the "bad year" that politicians were praying for (so they didn't have to fix it). [2]It's as bad as it was. Ireland's largest freshwater body is fecked, and likely to remain fecked for the foreseeable future. In fairness, this collapse is not due to datacentres, but has rather focussed attention on the (mis-)allocation of (finite) natural resources and the economic effects of their collapse.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2024/02/19/like-the-flip-of-a-switch-its-gone-has-the-ecosystem-of-lough-neagh-collapsed/
[2] https://ashesonair.org/2025/04/24/lough-neaghs-algae-crisis-northern-irelands-lake-in-peril/
"But AI can also decrease greenhouse gas emissions or lower overall emissions at a company level,"
Excise me, what?
It goes on to say racks went from 10kw, to 150kw and soon to 600kw, each.
How exactly is increasing the power used year after years, (non linearly?) reducing green house emissions.
An then you have most of the conservatives and republican politicians spouting off for the last few decades fomenting scepticism of science and you wonder why there is hesitancy regarding IT / technology.