Tech rebrands data centers as 'warmth barns' after midterm rout
Days after voters in 10 states moved to curb data centers, the industry is betting that a porch and a new name will do what campaign money could not.
The blueprints have not changed. The same windowless shed, the same generators, the same thirst for a small city's worth of power. The rendering has. It now shows a porch.
On Thursday, the Coalition for American Compute, the trade group for an industry that needs more electricity than the country currently makes, unveiled the warmth barn. It is a national rebranding of the data center, and it arrives nine days after voters in 10 states approved 33 measures restricting the facilities, with outright bans passing by 76 and 77 percent in two Ohio cities.
"America told us it hates data centers," said Dana Reyes, the coalition's president. "We listened. We will never build another one."
The warmth barn is, in engineering terms, a data center. It differs in that it is called a warmth barn and is painted a deep red. It also offers a porch with three rocking chairs, where residents can sit and feel the building's waste heat. Coalition literature describes this as a hug.
"No more data centers. Only barns."
Organizers of the backlash are unpersuaded. "It is the same building," said Marta Ellison, who campaigned for the ban in Hubbard, Ohio. "You can lean a chair against it. It is the same building."
The coalition disagrees, and has a brochure. Each warmth barn will heat a community pool, employ a porch ambassador, and host a quarterly cobbler. The servers inside will keep doing whatever the servers do, but quietly, and behind clapboard.
Lawyers for the group note that the new bans name data centers specifically. Zoning applications for the first three warmth barns, filed Thursday, list the land use as "agricultural thought storage."
Wall Street is receptive. One analyst's note called the plan "a direct answer to the industry's central problem, which was the name." An artificial intelligence firm weeks from a public offering, and in need of computing power that does not yet exist, has reserved three barns.
The porch test
Early returns suggest the rebrand may work. On Thursday night, the planning board of one Ohio township that banned data centers this month approved the state's first warmth barn, 3 to 0. All three of the board's questions had concerned the chairs.
Asked whether anything else about the buildings had changed, Reyes said the question missed the point. "The compute is identical," she said. "The porch is load-bearing."
