Most plush toys coo, giggle or say “I love you” when squeezed. Bezzy screams. The doll looks like a server rack with long arms, long legs and googly eyes. Press its torso and it plays a few grating seconds of audio recorded by a neighbor of a real data center in Virginia. The tag sewn into the toy reads: “Hug me for ear-piercing forever hum.”
Bezzy is the mascot of Adopt a Data Center, a satirical project from New York creative studio Basura and Big Data, the music project of producer Alan Wilkis, best known for the 2013 song “Dangerous” with the band Joywave. The campaign treats AI data centers like rescue animals looking for a forever home. The project calls Bezzy a “cuddly introduction to life with a real data center.” The official site pushes the joke further: “For just 600 acres, you can give an AI data center the home it deserves.” It was released on September 18, 2026, the same day as a new Big Data single.
The sound of a neighbor’s nightmare
The audio wasn’t made in a studio. Basura founder Rajeev Basu told WIRED the team picked this recording because it was “the clearest and most suitably irritating” of the ones they had. The person who made it compared the noise to “a car alarm going off nonstop. It’s high-pitched, and it’s all you can focus on.” Noise complaints are one of the most common objections from people living near the facilities that big AI companies have built across thousands of acres in the US. The others are energy consumption and new gas power.
What’s in the adoption kit
- A handmade plush toy made in the US and designed by Basura, with a signed tag
- A built-in recording of a real data center hum, triggered by a squeeze
- A limited run of just 20 dolls
- US$99.99 on the official site, with free US shipping; also sold through the Big Data storefront
- A sticker set with lines like “Every data center deserves a forever home,” “Please adopt me, I love GPU” and “Open your heart and your power grid”
Satire with footnotes
With only 20 units, the toy is really a hook. Clicking “adopt now” on the site doesn’t lead to a checkout pitch. It leads to a statement with links to research and reporting on how data centers affect the communities around them. Basu says the project grew out of dozens of interviews with people who live near US data centers. Its motto sums up the tone: “All they ask for is everything.”
Wilkis, whose Spotify bio reads “It’s giving Black Mirror, but make it music,” is openly critical. “AI is a proxy for decades of widening wealth inequality in America, and data centers are its physical embodiment,” he told WIRED. He added that roughly 40 percent of the stock market’s value rides on a handful of tech companies. He also pointed to one upside of the fight over data centers: the backlash crosses party lines.
Basu says the argument isn’t about whether AI infrastructure should exist. “It’s about who gets to decide where they go, what resources they consume, and whether the communities living beside them actually benefit.” It’s an unusual way to make that point, and anyone who squeezes the doll will hear it.
