The tech industry has largely failed to win over the public when it comes to AI.
Data centers have become a hot-button topic, with the vast majority of Americans — in a still-growing bipartisan cohort — now openly opposing them.
Meanwhile, panicking executives are desperately trying to pivot the messaging to shore up some support, in last-ditch efforts that aren’t proving fruitful.
As such, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman pleaded in a 3,000 word blog today with communities to embrace data centers, arguing that the United States “can’t afford to lose” the AI race, invoking the country’s post-World War II highway buildout as a parallel.
“Just like the national highway system, our country’s economy, national security, and everyday lives stand to benefit immensely,” he wrote.
The executive accused the media of spreading “misinformation and outright lies,” arguing that “in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before.” Garman even alleged that US adversaries were “intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about data centers to trick us into slowing down.”
“Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country,” Garman wrote. “If these measures are enacted, the US could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations.”
In his blog post, Garman tried to undermine concerns over data centers driving up electricity prices and producing huge amounts of pollution — despite existence of ample evidence to the contrary.
Those attempts to dispel “myths” shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the enormous backlash. But given the impossible-to-ignore vested interest in underplaying these concerns, we should take Garman’s efforts with an enormous grain of salt.
Just last year, leaked internal Amazon documents showed that executives were exchanging notes about how to keep the public ignorant about the “true extent” of the massive amounts of water their data centers use.
Earlier this year, Axios also reported that Amazon’s AI buildout fueled an unprecedented leap in the company’s emissions, despite pledging to reach a net-zero carbon footprint by 2040.
While Garman argues that it’s “untrue” that data centers are spewing huge amounts of carbon emissions with backup diesel generators, we’ve seen plenty of evidence to the contrary. In Texas alone, dozens of AI data center facilities are using environmentally harmful generators by exploiting regulatory loopholes.
As much as Garman doesn’t want to admit it, energy prices are indeed sending power bills soaring, a fact that certainly isn’t an example of “misleading and convenient scapegoating.”
He also tried to argue that “thousands of construction jobs are created to build data centers,” without mentioning that most of those jobs evaporate once they’re built.
If anything, Garman’s desperate plea — which wraps up with announcing the establishment of a “new community program” with the cutesy name of “Built Together” — highlights just how badly the industry has lost the plot. Just this week, a Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 62 percent of Americans supported a pause on the construction of AI data centers, 40 percent of whom said it was a top priority.
Undermining the very real concerns of people across the country is unlikely to make a dent in those numbers.
More on data centers: Data Centers Are a $6 Trillion Time Bomb, Analysts Warn
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