Executive Summary

• Adam Nethersole, SVP Sales & Marketing of Kao Data, sits down with Chief Editor, Lauren Raybould, to talk about the lack of public understanding around data centres, the email exchange he had with a concerned resident, and what the industry needs to do to bridge that communications gap.
• Predominantly, the industry is B2B so they’ve never had to explain themselves to anyone. In the last five to ten years, the public has become the end user of everything we enable, which quietly turns part of our job into a B2C communications role. The industry hasn’t yet realised how quickly that gap is widening.
• If you tell people nothing, they will fill the space themselves, and what fills it is usually worse than the truth. Following an email exchange with a concerned community member, Adam gives this advice to the industry: just one email from one resident is a clear signal. Responding quickly is the difference between a conversation and a campaign. The practical step that underpins everything else is that the industry has to become more transparent.

1) Data centres are the digital backbone of our society and underpin almost everything we do online, yet public understanding of what data centres are and what they do seems stuck a decade behind the industry’s growth. Why do you think there’s such a disconnect between the industry and the public?

I’d actually put it the other way around. Public use of digital services has raced ahead, and it’s the industry’s external voice that hasn’t kept pace. Twenty years ago, we were quietly providing capacity to the financial services sector, and nobody outside that world needed to know we existed. Not everyone had a mobile phone. Today, everybody on the street is constantly using digital services, and the companies underpinning them are still emerging from an era of secrecy. The root of it is that data centres have always been a B2B industry. We’ve provided a service to other businesses, so we’ve never had to explain ourselves to anybody else. We aren’t trained to do it, we aren’t set up to do it, and in many cases we aren’t ready to do it. What’s changed in the last five to ten years is that the public has become the end user of everything we enable, which quietly turns part of our job into a B2C communications role. My worry is that the industry hasn’t yet realised how quickly that gap is widening.

2) What are the misconceptions you encounter most often from communities? And which ones genuinely surprise you, given how much “myth-busting” content the industry publishes?

Water is the big one. Most people assume a data centre nearby will drain the local supply and affect their water pressure at home, when in reality it’s a separate supply running on a closed loop with no link to their taps whatsoever.

That misconception is partly our own fault. The statistics in wide circulation come from older American facilities using water tower cooling, and we haven’t communicated clearly enough about how the technology has moved on. It’s something we care deeply about at Kao Data. After that, it’s power. People assume a data centre next door pushes up their household bills, but wholesale and residential pricing are entirely different metrics with no relationship to each other. People also see the generators onsite and assume we run on diesel permanently, which we don’t.

The one that surprises me most is the belief that a data centre is three people and a robot. A 20MW facility will typically support around 30 to 40 people covering mechanical and electrical engineering, security, maintenance, health and safety, catering and grounds, plus a substantial supply chain around it.

The other is how little people connect data centres to their own lives. Most of us will engage with one more than 500 times a day without ever thinking about it.

As for why the myth-busting isn’t landing, the industry’s instinct has been to answer everything with a white paper. If you’re a resident in Stockport, for example, you are probably not familiar with what a white paper is, and you’re certainly not going to read one. People are searching on social platforms, on YouTube and increasingly through AI tools. Producing another PDF isn’t a communications strategy. It’s also worth saying we’re in something of a perfect storm. Demand for digital services has gone through the roof because of AI, and at the same time people are seeing the teething problems that come with any industrial revolution.

Jobs disappear before the new ones emerge, which is exactly what happened with textile industry and later with the automotive sector. Look at how many staffed tills there are in a supermarket now compared with a decade ago.

People don’t attribute that to a chatbot. They attribute it to the large unmarked building down the road.

3) Whose job is it to close this gap: the media, the operators, the hyperscalers, local councils, or the trade bodies?

It sits with all sides, and each has a different job to do.

Hyperscalers and AI providers need to talk clearly about the benefits. At the moment, AI is sold on removing a couple of steps when you edit a photo or book a restaurant, which appeals to a fairly narrow audience. We hear far less about AI accelerating cancer detection, supporting dementia research or modelling climate change. Those are the applications that make the case to the general public, and they’re the ones that go unsaid.

Operators like us need to be more transparent about what we do, what we enable and how we do it. That means getting out of the mindset of secrecy. The government has a key role in explaining why digital infrastructure is a critical national infrastructure, particularly in terms of security and inward investment. Data centres are the factories of this age, and society will continue to depend on them.

The media has a responsibility, too. Negative stories are easier to write and travel further, but publishers are wholly reliant on this infrastructure themselves. It takes one inflated story about temperature rise to fan the flames of resentment in a community, and accuracy tends to be the main casualty.

4) Data centres are famously referred to as black boxes and “parasites”, with unmarked buildings, security clearance for visits, notably limited visits for journalists, and limited disclosure on power and water usage. Do you think that culture of secrecy is itself partly responsible for the suspicion and misinformation we’re now seeing from residents?

Yes, in large part. The secrecy made sense in its original context. When you’re housing the trading systems of financial institutions, discretion and security are key components of the product. But that posture has outlived the conditions that created it, and we’ve carried it into a world where the public are the ultimate users of everything inside the building. If you tell people nothing, they will fill the space themselves, and what fills it is usually worse than the truth. The water figures are the clearest example. We left an information vacuum and outdated numbers filled it. Silence hasn’t protected the industry, it has cost us the benefit of the doubt.

5) Recently, you received an email from a member of the public expressing concerns about the upcoming data centre development in her neighbourhood. What was your first reaction reading it?

Two things. The first was that we needed to respond promptly. The second was a genuine realisation, because the questions she raised were unlike anything I’d seen before. She wasn’t objecting to a data centre being built. This wasn’t a case of “not in my backyard” at all. She wanted to know whether her electricity bill would increase, whether the pressure in her bathroom would drop and what it would mean for the air around her. She had connected a development near her home to what she drinks, what she breathes and what she pays. Those are the fundamentals of somebody’s life. That was the eye-opener. After twenty years in this industry, you forget how far your frame of reference has drifted from everybody else’s. Her concern was whether she could fill her bath. It brought the whole gap into focus in a way no report ever has, and it’s a reminder that we’re very good at talking to each other and very poor at talking to anyone else outside of industry about  their genuine concerns and fears

6) You’ve offered her a funded trip to Harlow and a personal visit when you’re next in Stockport. That’s a meaningful gesture for one household, but how does a company turn that kind of response into something to help close the information gap for communities?

You take the learning from one conversation and find ways to put it in front of as many people as possible. Practically, that means being present in the communities themselves. I sat down with residents at a community event in Park Royal recently, and we’re planning to run something similar in Stockport. Those conversations tell you what people actually want to know, which is rarely what we assume. Beyond that, we’re working on a platform designed to distil the common fears and questions about data centres into something genuinely digestible for a general audience. Not a technical document, and not written for the industry. Something a resident can find, read and trust. That’s the critical piece the sector is missing.

7) What can the wider industry take from this email exchange, and what practical steps would actually start closing that knowledge gap?

The first takeaway is that this is a grassroots challenge, and it’s only going to grow. One email from one resident is a clear signal. Concerns are local, personal and rooted in people’s own homes and bills rather than in anything abstract about the sector. Second, speed matters. Responding quickly is the difference between a conversation and a campaign. Third, and this is the practical step that underpins everything else, the industry has to become more transparent. Less secretive, more open and more honest about what we do and how we do it. That means publishing real figures, opening our doors more often, and communicating in formats people actually use. Everything else follows from that.