The AI and Data Center Image Problem

A couple days ago, John Carmack, a videogame pioneer and former virtual reality executive at Meta Platforms, wrote on X that he had begun seeing anti–data center yard signs popping up in his neighborhood. “I am entertaining the idea of paying for a billboard with something like ‘Data centers are awesome, Texas should lead!’” wrote Carmack, who has co-founded an AI startup, Keen Technologies. 

In a follow-up post, Carmack compared the brewing public hostility toward AI to the domestic backlash against nuclear power, which snowballed after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. “I consider it a tragedy that anti-nuclear efforts largely strangled nuclear power in the US based on vibes, and I don’t want to see that happen to AI,” he wrote. It’s going to take a lot more than billboards to fix AI’s brand problems with the American people.