Executive Summary

• Data centre credibility is fragile amongst the general public, which is why marketing and PR are crucial to get ‘right’. Bad PR analogies, such as “whataboutisms”, are ruining the public’s perception of the industry fast.
• Using “whataboutisms” to ‘prove’ that the proposed 100-megawatt facility, like telling them “golf courses use more water”, will fuel the fire rather than help proposals get approved. Local communities don’t care about the golf course two states away, they care about what’s happening in their actual area.
• $130bn in planned data centre developments stalled or blocked in the first three months of 2026 already in the US, and more will follow if the industry doesn’t become more honest. To tell the wonderful industry stories requires embracing the uncomfortable notion of operational transparency instead of making irrelevant, flippant comparisons.

Opposition from local communities is on the rise, especially in the UK and US; with $130bn in planned data centre developments stalled or blocked in the first three months of 2026 already in the US, and more will follow. City councils and town halls are pausing new permits because they just can’t trust the messages coming from developers.

You can scroll through any social media debate about AI infrastructure or listen to public comments at city zoning meetings and you’ll find the same defensive arguments rehashed over and over:

• An air-cooled data centre uses less water on-site than a local library.
• All data centres in the country combined use less water than the golf courses.

On paper, there’s a narrow kernel of truth to these statements, but if you were to use them in PR analogies and when developers and tech advocates rely on those lines to ease local anxieties, it naturally backfires. There’s no local easing of anxieties. Instead, these bad-fath analogies are damaging industry and fueling NIMBY. Comparing data centres to libraries and golf courses oversimplifies the complex engineering that happens and how the sector can build community trust y

The analogy trap

Let’s break down the analogies and technicalities behind it.

The library comparison only rings true if a facility uses a closed-loop liquid cooling solution, which drops water consumption on-site dramatically. Say if those facilities were 200,000-square-foot and employed a dozen security guards and engineers, then the direct tap water usage – we’re talking bathrooms, sinks, staff areas, can definitely be lower than a public library that has been visited by 500 people a day. However, the issue with this is that air-chilled systems then need a lot of electricity, and to generate that, power plants then consume vast volumes of water off-site. The water footprint wasn’t eliminated entirely, but it was shifted from the data centre to the regional electrical grid.

The more well-known golf course analogy is a different ball game and it is true, but it really does boil down to macro aggregate vs local density. Golf courses are broadly distributed across the country and rely on non-potable/recycled greywater for turf management. Data centres are clustered tightly in specific hubs, such as London, Dublin and Northern Virginia, and they draw directly from drinking water supplies.

“Whataboutism” as a defence will backfire

Whether it’s in a water-stressed region where the public is raising concerns or in an online “debate” or post on LinkedIn (or Reddit, for that matter), the worst defence to use is “whataboutism” to ‘prove’ that the proposed 100-megawatt facility, so telling them “golf courses use more water” or that the building “uses less tap water than a library”. It’s more of a deflection than anything.

Local residents care more about what’s happening locally, their neighbourhood, their utility bills and the power capacity in their area, not macroeconomic averages. Furthermore, when people rely on cherry-picked stats, it breaches trust, so the community loses all trust, which then ensures the PR narrative fails and ignores the geographical factors, because, quite simply, a town won’t care about that golf course three states away.

What should the industry do then?

The industry has incredible minds that have innovated incredible solutions and products to further advance our digital world. It has amazing stories to tell, but that requires embracing the uncomfortable notion of operational transparency instead of making irrelevant, flippant comparisons.

Acknowledging tradeoffs like honesty about power versus water goes a long way, instead of trying to pretend they don’t; like explaining how evap cooling saves on power but uses more water, air cooling saves water but is a power sink, and so on.

Research into circular solutions and highlight active investments in greywater recycling, rainwater harvesting and community heat-reuse solutions instead of abstraction comparisons.

Lastly, respect that it’s the local context that matters for local folks; addressing local aquifer health with real engineering data and not mact-industry averages will change the narrative for local communities.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the industry needs to become transparent, accountable, and good neighbours if they want to keep developing and growing, otherwise real local communities can have the power to stop proposals and planning and that will be the ultimate bottleneck.