OpenAI’s Crisis PR Solution to Growing Resistance to Data Centers

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Data centers are popping up everywhere. OpenAI in particular is feeling the resistance from communities for its Stargate centers. What is OpenAI doing about it — watch my YouTube Short.

It is devising a new crisis PR solution.

It is hiring “community engagement leads”. See article in Business Insider.

From the beginning, data centers faced a real “NIMBY” problem — “not in my back yard.” So, these new workers are going to liaison with community members. OpenAI said a measure of success for these community engagement workers will be to “reduce friction”.

Will these community engagement leads be able to quell the anti-AI surge that is growing stronger and stronger? The New York Times recently published an article about how a stay-at-home mom is leading the charge against a large data center in Montana. And communities across America are squarely rejecting data centers being built in their communities. See the DataCenterWatch.org report, which is tracking where data centers are being blocked or delayed.

Will these “community engagement leads” be able to push past community resistance? We shall see. In the meantime, it appears that OpenAI has either deleted its posting for the position on LinkedIn, or the positions have all been filled.

At one time they had a job posting on LinkedIn (first image).

But when we clicked through on the job posting, it was gone as of May 30 (second image).

Time will tell how effective these community engagement leads are, and whether OpenAI can make the case that communities are better off having data centers than not.