OpenAI is betting a data center rebrand will make you hate them less
You’re also, in this document, rebranding data centers to “compute campuses,” which when I say it, I have trouble not laughing because it sounds like a bit of a joke to meet everyone’s concerns with a rebrand.
Key points
- Out of 41 local ballot initiatives limiting the data center buildout, 40 of them passed, according to the New York Times.
- The AI industry knows it was a tough cycle: Chris Lehane, the chief global affairs officer for OpenAI, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that “I could take my shirt off and show you my [metaphorical] bruises if you want.” Now, OpenAI is figuring out how to move forward.
- They discussed the lessons of the midterm election, why OpenAI would prefer that we call data centers “compute campuses,” and why Lehane thinks the 2028 presidential election will largely revolve around AI — just not in the same way that 2026 did.
Lehane talked with Sean from rural Texas, where he said he was on a “listening and learning” tour of communities around the site of a massive OpenAI data center.
Seventy percent of the country, maybe more than that, says that they’re against data centers, or “compute campuses,” as you’re now calling them.
Additional details
- You guys at OpenAI, in the wake of this shellacking, put out this big document saying that you’re going to be listening, you’re going to be learning, you’re going to be empowering local people and bringing jobs.
- When people talked about the cloud, this is actually where the cloud was housed, where you would load data if you were streaming a video, if you were ordering something from a delivery service.
- And compute is just the raw computing power that it takes to train AI systems and then run AI tools and products when you’re using them.
- | Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Republicans weren’t the only big losers in last week’s midterms: Across the country, voters also backed restrictions on data centers and elected candidates promising tougher oversight of AI companies.
- I think each of the individual projects themselves have been some version of a laboratory of democracy, where you actually learn from each project and apply those learnings to the next project.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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