Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, posted that the industry needs to come up with a new way of talking about data centers; Axios picked it up. Matt Higgins, co-founder and chief executive of the investment firm RSE Ventures, was more specific. He proposed renaming them outright: "fraud prevention centers," "clean energy efficiency centers," "precision agriculture centers." His reasoning is that the phrase "data center" describes only the infrastructure and not the breakthroughs its compute makes possible. Behind the vocabulary exercise sit two figures: $130 billion in projects under threat, and a three-month window, the first months of 2026.
This is the second act of a messaging campaign. The first one ran on fear. Executives warned about an approaching AI apocalypse, which served to convince investors that the technology was world-altering and to push the public toward accepting fewer regulatory limits on it. The tone has now changed. Under political and financial pressure, the same people are trying to win public support for data centers with promises of hope and a positive shared future for humanity. They appear not to have registered that the pivot is happening in full view.
Mark Zuckerberg supplied the template in early August with a strenuously optimistic essay of 6,500 words. His argument: AI will free up time for the things people actually enjoy and help them do more than they could without it. Words are cheap, and Meta's own conduct suggests that employee wellbeing does not rank among the priorities of technology leadership in the AI era. The pattern repeats elsewhere in the genre — entrepreneurs constructing utopian scenarios out of AI capabilities that do not yet exist.
Higgins is not a disinterested observer of the naming problem. RSE Ventures has holdings across entertainment and media, and it is also interested in military AI, which makes it interested in very large data centers. The person proposing a friendlier word for the buildings has a position in the buildings.
Each of his three candidate names is a promise about capability dressed as a description of a facility. The record so far points the other way. AI is already accelerating fraud and environmental damage at unprecedented scale. Some farmers are receiving fabricated advice from it that produces entirely preventable crop losses. Whether the industry delivers the breakthroughs Higgins wants to name the buildings after remains an "if," not a "when," and renaming the building does not move the odds.
What makes the shift a communications decision rather than a change of position is that nothing material moved between the two pitches. The buildings are the same buildings, the capital plans are the same capital plans, and the regulatory relief the fear campaign was designed to extract has not been handed back. Only the audience changed. Apocalypse talk was aimed at investors and legislators, who reward the impression of a technology too powerful to constrain. Hope talk is aimed at the people who have to live beside the sites, and who are unmoved by the argument that something enormous and unstoppable is being built next to them.
The more interesting question is what the rename would actually accomplish, since it would not change a single specification. A "precision agriculture center" is a harder thing to organize against than a data center. That is the function, and it is the only function available, because the alternative — naming a breakthrough, attaching a date to it, or committing to a measurable obligation toward the places that host the racks — is notably absent from every version of this argument I have seen. Ohanian's post identified a storytelling problem. Nobody in the exchange identified a delivery problem.
So the messaging gets sunnier while the substance holds still. The industry is asking the public to accept the buildings on the strength of what the compute inside them might one day do. It made the same request in the opposite emotional register, and the buildings are identical either way.