Data Center Industry Turns to Schools and Field Trips to Win Public Support

Facing intensifying pushback against massive data center build-outs, companies and industry groups are adopting a softer community relations tactic: winning over children through school outreach, branded educational materials, and facility field trips.

Storybooks and Flag Kits

The nonprofit 7x24 Exchange International promotes data centers as "mission critical" infrastructure and recommends the children's story "What is a Data Center?" in which a honey badger named Honey receives a guided tour from a worker named Oliver. The story is part of a broader industry effort alongside lobbying, job creation programs, and tax breaks.

In May, the Potomac chapter of the Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM), a data center trade group, sponsored Memorial Day-themed flag-making kits for 3,100 first graders at 37 schools in Loudoun County, Virginia, an area known as Data Center Alley. The kits included an informational card touting the "positive impact" of the data center industry on the local economy.

7x24 Exchange also runs "International Data Center Day," which it says is designed to inspire the next generation of talent. The nonprofit provides a crossword puzzle for high schools and coloring pages, an evaporation science project, and print-out activities such as "Draw a picture of the cloud" and "Draw a data superhero" for elementary schools.

Field Trips and Classroom Visits

Since 2025, at least eleven companies and industry groups have hosted student field trips to local data centers, according to a tally of public blogs and social media posts by WIRED. In Minnesota, 7x24 Exchange brought Fridley High School students to a Cummins power generation facility to learn about the generators that power data centers.

Sabey, which operates seven US data centers, has hosted trips for Washington state high schoolers, including students from Eastmont High School in May and Quincy High School last October. Quincy communications coordinator Jessica Blancas said the district has organized data center visits for many years at Microsoft, Vantage, Yahoo, and Sabey, calling Sabey a long-standing partner offering guest speakers, mock interviews, and internships.

Amazon hosted a field trip last February at its Arlington, Virginia "Skills Center," a free community space for people curious about cloud computing and future jobs. The event was open to any high school in the DC metro area, though only Jackson-Reed High School attended.

Critics Compare the Campaign to Old Industry Playbooks

Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the National Education Policy Center, said industries with image problems, including fast food, tobacco, and oil and gas, have brought messaging into schools for more than a century. "A very, very big reason why corporations get involved in the schools is, quite simply, corporate propaganda," he said.

A Pew Research poll conducted over the summer found that about half of 10,000 Americans surveyed see data centers as "mostly bad" for the environment and quality of life. Offering educational materials and field trips is a way industries maintain their social license to operate, following a playbook used by the oil and gas and tech sectors with K-12 STEM programs and pro-industry lessons in states like Oklahoma and Texas.

Molnar questioned the value for students, describing data centers as miles of servers generating heat and noise with few workers, and argued children are "in an absolutely powerless position" and need protection from corporate influence in schools.

Sources: Wired