Earlier this year, shots were fired and an incendiary device was thrown at the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In a recent interview with Time, he reflected on the past year: "It has been a painful personal experience. Clearly, people hate data centres—right now, at least. People are pretty negative on AI."
Does that mean OpenAI is packing it in, and going home? Well, no. The AI infrastructure buildout is continuing in earnest, with OpenAI planning to invest another $50 million this year alone on collecting compute. Sachin Katti, the co-lead on OpenAI's compute strategy told Time that the company's earlier investments now appear "very prescient," going on to add, "We are still short of compute. If anything, we should have bought a lot more."
If OpenAI's machine-learning products don't bring in the revenue the company would like, renting out its compute capacity to other parties is another option. Altman told Time, "I think we are going to be able to use all of the compute very profitably that we are planning to build."
Intent on investing millions more either way, it makes me wonder where the company will find the space to build—not just in terms of logistics, but also in terms of 'Who would want an AI data centre next door?' As we've previously covered, data centres don't always make great neighbours, with Wisconsin residents filing a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft earlier this year, alleging 'unreasonable and excessive noise'.
For another example from last year, Elon Musk's Colossus data centre was at the centre of an environmental row over air quality in South Memphis. The impact of data centres on nearby communities is by no means the only reason fuelling negative sentiments towards AI, but tangible knock-on effects like rising power costs are hard to ignore. There are also bigger picture environmental effects to consider, with one report suggesting gas power projects for just 11 US data centre projects could emit more greenhouse gases than entire countries.
The class of 2026 is arguably not looking forward to the world that may follow; an ex-Google CEO was loudly booed by a stadium full of students after talking about AI, while another university graduate speaker was booed for saying AI 'is the next industrial revolution.' As for games, one data analyst found that Steam games which disclosed the use of AI got 53% fewer reviews overall, and those they do get tend to generally be more negative too. Clearly, many people hate data centres—and I'd say that's for good reason too.
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