Rebranding efforts

The forces behind the rapid expansion of massive data centers have launched a public relations campaign to undermine widespread and growing opposition. The extent of the resistance to data centers is unprecedented. Stories of people reaching across differences to join in opposition are widespread. 

These new coalitions helped shape the primary elections. In most of the country, Democrats benefited from stressing opposition to these centers. So much so that the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) warned in a remarkable memo that data center politics are endangering their chances in Ohio and potentially everywhere.

In the section entitled “What has to happen,” the NRSC, a  political party, cannot “fix the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy.” The republicans plead, “The companies that need these projects have to fix” how people see them, or campaigns against them will spread and endanger republican candidates everywhere.

The memo also emphasizes that a key “fix” is to say that companies should “only let data centers be built in communities that approve them by a local vote of the people, and that pay for their own power, water, and other utilities.” 

Apparently, many in the data center world did not get the memo. Certainly, that is the case here in Michigan. 

Instead of slowing down construction, engaging seriously with communities, or considering the construction of smaller, less intrusive facilities, corporations are doubling down on their efforts to bully and bribe their way into communities. They are claiming communities can benefit from these centers without any real harm. The centers will have their own electrical power plants, be careful of water and the environment, and provide hundreds of high-paying jobs.

A clear example of this new public relations effort came from the soon-to-be ex-president of the University of Michigan.  Writing in Crain's last week, President Domenico Grasso characterized the decision to build a massive data center in Ypsilanti Township as both “important” and “difficult.” He did not say he was willing to reconsider the decision. 

 Instead, he launched a defense, rebranding what the U of M is doing. The term “data center” appears only twice in the editorial, and then only to say this construction project is not like them. He says, “This is not a hyperscale commercial data center built to power online shopping, stream movies, or store social media assets.” Rather, it is a “scientific research instrument. Its sole purpose is to accelerate discoveries that improve lives.” Earlier, he called this massive data center project “a new high-performance research computing center.”

He assures us that the data center will be smaller, use limited water, and be energy efficient, saying, “The facility is ultimately expected to use roughly one-tenth as much electricity as a commercial data center while occupying a much smaller footprint.”

Grasso then argues that this increased computing power, housed in this tiny center, is critical to advancing science. He implies we will all benefit, just as we are now, from the “advanced computing to improve cancer treatment, accelerate drug discovery, increase energy efficiency, and strengthen the reliability of tomorrow’s electric grid. Expanded computing capacity will enable those discoveries to happen faster and at a scale that simply is not possible today.”

Such public relations rebranding is meaningless and designed only to cloud the issue. 

This new data center is not partnering with cancer research or even a drug company. It is with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a detail Mr. Gasso fails to mention in his editorial. That information only appears in the title. Los Alamos is the primary federal weapons research facility. Its mission is to create instruments of war, not cure disease. To pretend that this facility is being constructed to advance scientific research dedicated to health is absurd.

The effort to disguise and obscure the purpose of these data centers is linked to a fundamental disdain for democracy and public sensibilities. It is embedded in the belief that the techno elite know what is best. The rest of us should simply go along with their decisions.  

Massive data centers are not being implemented to help us shop more.  They are fundamental to the control of people and the development of weapons of war. That is the heart of the issues around data centers: who decides, who benefits, and for what purposes?  Resistance to data centers is an essential step on the path to constructing a living democracy capable of making decisions that advance the quality of all of our lives.