Datacentres are deeply unpopular – so the geniuses at OpenAI are rebranding them

These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them

Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.

Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When he’s not golfing or commenting on senators’ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to people’s lives.

Trump isn’t alone in thinking a rebrand can distract from bigger issues. The tech industry seems to be on a mission to pepper every inch of the earth with datacentres that will facilitate our glorious AI-powered future. One slight problem: the hoi polloi are not quite so enthusiastic. People around the world are increasingly nervous about AI. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans across the political spectrum hate datacentres with a passion; so much so that they have become one of the biggest talking points of the midterms. There are various reasons for this anger, but the big one is that a lot of people blame the resource-guzzling centres for driving up the cost of utility bills. And so, with Trumpian logic, the great minds at OpenAI have come up with a brilliant solution to their very bad image problem. They will rename datacentres … wait for it … compute campuses.

Did a consultant (or ChatGPT) land on this new alliterative formulation because it sounded a smidgen warmer, a bit more human, than datacentres? I presume that is the case, but the official explanation is somewhat more convoluted. “Compute campuses better describes the scale and role of the infrastructure we’re building for AI,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider on Sunday. “These are long-term investments in computing, energy infrastructure and skilled work.”

As someone once said, nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people, but do the geniuses at OpenAI really think the public is stupid enough to be swayed by a few new buzzwords?

I won’t speculate as to what these people think, but I will concede that names do matter. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), the major US healthcare reform passed in Barack Obama’s first term, is one obvious example. When the ACA was being debated, Republicans started calling it “Obamacare” to try to make it seem as if it was a self-serving power grab by the president. This wasn’t an entirely successful ploy, but it did cause a lot of confusion. A 2017 Morning Consult study found that a third of Americans had no idea that the ACA and Obamacare were the same things. About 80% of Republicans strongly disapproved of Obamacare while only about 60% strongly disapproved of the ACA. “Very slight variations in how you describe something can change people’s minds,” the co-founder of Morning Consult noted at the time.

That said, I’m fairly certain that a new name for datacentres isn’t going to win hearts and change minds. But that’s OK: the tech industry has other tricks up its sleeve and a number of helpful partners in crime. Fox News, for example, seems to be going out of its way to do PR for the industry. According to a new analysis by Media Matters for America, the volume of pro-datacentre claims made by Fox News personalities and guests increased 420% after 18 August. That’s not a random date; it’s when the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a memo warning that animosity towards the industry could hurt pro-datacentre Republican candidates in the midterms.

As the propaganda proliferates, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we’re simultaneously seeing the gradual criminalisation of opposition to AI. In June, the Intercept reported that Philadelphia police were scanning “social media looking for posts opposing AI datacentres” because of a supposed risk from “domestic violent extremists”. Meanwhile, in August, Futurism counted at least 37 arrests from protests related to datacentres so far this year, many for petty infractions. Since that analysis, there have been a number of other reported arrests. It seems the powers that be think that if people can’t be brainwashed into loving the “compute campus” next door, they can always be scared into shutting up.