// WIRED US/UK — MONDO
Data Centers Have a New PR Plan: Your Kid’s Field Trip
Welcome back to Power Play! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. They’re out this week, so Caroline Haskins is reporting for duty. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Caroline an email at [email protected] or reach her securely on Signal at carolinehaskins.61.
The nonprofit 7x24 Exchange International wants to promote data centers, which they believe are "mission critical” infrastructure. As part of this work, the group recommends a children’s story, “What is a Data Center?,” which follows a honey badger named Honey who gets a guided tour of a data center from a worker named Oliver. Oliver explains that the job of data center employees is to make sure that the “functions supported by the data center” are available to anybody, “no matter what time it is.”
"Like when my mom shops online late at night because my dad is sleeping and won't know about it?" Honey asks.
The story is part of a broader pattern across the data center industry. In addition to lobbying, job creation programs, tax breaks, companies and interest groups are trying something a bit more creative: winning over the youth. As pushback to massive data center build-outs and energy-guzzling campuses intensifies, the industry is apparently taking a softer approach to community building using a tactic other industries with a public relations problem have tried.
Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the director of the National Education Policy Center, tells WIRED that, for over a century, industries with an image problem—fast food, tobacco, oil and gas—have brought their messaging to schools.
“A very, very big reason why corporations get involved in the schools is, quite simply, corporate propaganda—for the purpose not necessarily of selling a product, but of telling their ‘story,’” Molnar says.
In May, the Potomac chapter of the Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM), a trade group for the data center industry, sponsored Memorial Day-themed flag-making kits to be distributed to 3,100 first graders across 37 schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, also known as Data Center Alley. In addition to the flag kits, kids received an informational card with statistics about “the positive impact” that the data center industry has on the local economy.
Besides promoting heartwarming tales about how women can shop, 7x24 Exchange is also the brains behind a holiday it calls “International Data Center Day,” which is “designed to create awareness of the data center industry and inspire the next generation of talent.”
The nonprofit encourages people to pitch the holiday to school administrators. For participating high schools, it offers a celebratory crossword puzzle and information about data center training programs. For elementary schools, it offers data center-themed coloring pages, instructions for an evaporation-themed science project, and print-out activities like “Draw a picture of the cloud" and “Draw a data superhero.” It also promotes several data center-themed books for young readers, including one in which two sisters visit a data center and meet a robot named JB and another that features two brothers who visit a "vibrant digital world" and save the internet. Then there’s “Polly Packet's Precious Payload,” which follows a mother who teaches her daughter about data centers.
7x24 Exchange has also visited or organized at least a half-dozen K-12 events at schools across the country this year. In Minnesota, it brought Fridley High School students on a field trip to a local Cummins diesel power generation facility in order to learn about the “generators that power data centers worldwide.” (7x24 Exchange, Cummins, and Fridley High School did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.)