Datacenters have a public image problem, industry confesses to The Reg

'Most people are f**king scared of AI, like we're feeding a monster'

The current craze for AI has helped drive a wave of datacenter building, but the industry has run into opposition from local communities in many areas, something it is understandably keen to address.

[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 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 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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

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"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.

"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.

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"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 Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and introducing an 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. ®

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