Don’t mention the data center: OpenAI calls them ‘compute campuses’ instead

OpenAI has responded to the data center culture war pitting communities against tech companies with a proposal to reduce its power demand during periods of grid strain. The company is also mindful of the bad publicity generated by talk of data centers and has renamed them “compute campuses” in an attempt to make them less scary. This is in line with the recent trend for renaming places like the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, or rebranding artificial intelligence as super intelligence. The new name cropped up four times, and data centers just twice, in OpenAI’s announcement of its Grid Protectors Program, a proposal to dial back electricity consumption in its data centers when demand is high so that nearby homes can continue to run their air conditioning or heating. Data centers’ increasing power consumption is straining the grid, with AI servers accounting for an ever larger share of that consumption, with further increases forecast. These demands are leading to a growing number of protests against the development of data centers, which could lead to construction delays. OpenAI claims that its Grid Protectors Program will meet some of those issues head-on by taking into account future capacity needs and working to make power flexibility a key element in data center, sorry, compute campus, design. The company said that the approach would differ, region by region. It has yet to finalize all the details of the scheme, but it hopes to head off some of the protests. It remains to be seen whether it has this effect. Google recently took the opposite approach to the peak consumption problem, proposing to pay people to turn off their appliances at times of high demand so that it can continue to power its data centers. This article first appeared on Network World.