I genuinely think it was a big loss to our society that we stopped regularly doing this. I had a few such field trips in grade school, but nothing comparable to a factory or nuclear plant.

It's a combination of post-9/11 security paranoia, companies not wanting to do anything that doesn't directly make them money, and the loss of manufacturing and heavy industry in the West, all together. It's sad.

Yeah, but draconian laws aside (I jest a bit) if you can ensure safety for kids (and clumsy adults) visiting factories and NUCLEAR plants I guess you could manage the same for data centers and deal with a reasonable number of headaches.

It's not really too complicated, iirc. They already generally have visitor processes set up for customers and prospective customers.

The servers themselves are in cages, of course, and presumably the tour wouldn't actually go into those. Plus, yeah, what the other comment said.

They could say anything and the visitors would have to believe it. A canyon tour guide tells me a story about why a rock formation is named the way it is. I have no clue if it’s true. But I enjoy it still.

The tour guide could just give that answer to any such question. It'd be comparable to the answer given to someone who wants to know what that new railroad which was built where there used to be fields or forest is used for: people ride it to go somewhere, freight is passing over it going places.

Having said this I do feel like these data centres should be built in such a way that waste heat is used in some way. Use it to heat structures, greenhouses, whatever. I used to live in a place where a large fraction of the block heating came from a nearby power plant with additional gas-fired heating for when the waste heat wasn't enough. The same can be done with waste heat from data centres by using heat pumps. This can work in colder climates and in the cooler seasons in moderate climates.