The datacenter industry is using propaganda to fight opposition | Samuel Woolley, Dean Jackson and Maia Woluchem

Detailed summary

Big tech has used misdirection, disinformation and jargon to obscure the harm the facilities can cause to communities“Antifa”. “Commies”. “Chinese bots”. Everyone from tech…

Big tech has used misdirection, disinformation and jargon to obscure the harm the facilities can cause to communities

“Antifa”. “Commies”. “Chinese bots”. Everyone from tech leaders to the president has called datacenter resistance a “documented psyop” and a “Chinese PR thing”.

But why do they make these claims? Our new research finds that the datacenter industry uses propaganda, disinformation, and information control to mold public opinion and undermine community opposition.

Big tech’s opening pitch about datacenters was typical: they told Americans that these facilities brought jobs and tax revenue. They spread this message through mailers, text messages, TV spots and targeted digital ads.

But much of the spending behind these multimedia campaigns flowed through opaque non-profits and dark money groups with tech industry ties, hiding the source of these efforts. Groups like “Elevate New Mexico” have passed themselves off as local initiatives while obscuring their connections to corporate entities in the datacenter space.

As environmental concerns mounted, the industry turned to misdirection and jargon to obscure datacenters’ impact.

Developers continue to use terms such as “closed-loop cooling” and “behind-the-meter power” to deflect concerns about water and power consumption. But while these approaches can mitigate consumption, the effect is smaller than often implied: closed-loop systems may simply shift demand for water up the supply chain to power plants, while behind-the-meter generators still rely on the grid for backup and stability while competing with it for components.

And those industry figures about job creation? They are often presented without any context.

To give an example, an ad by Build American AI – an industry advocacy group connected to Lead the Future, an industry Pac funded by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz – boasts that datacenters have created 57,785 jobs in Texas.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Guardian Business. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.