What revenues are provided to the locals (people, or government) from data centre operators aside from taxes on water/power? Once constructed, they provide few jobs, and their services are used wherever the network touches. It's not like the presence of a data centre spawns a lot of tech related construction (offices, cloud servers, Starbucks, ...).
At least a warehouse (today, anyway) hires warm bodies to schlepp goods around. Those electrons move themselves. Thinking about it again, it's basically colonization. The data centre owner drops a box that consumes local resources and is expected to purchase finished goods.
Journalism from many outlets has confirmed that the people claiming to be directly impacted by excessive noise pollution (90 dB or more), air pollution from on-site generation or water pollution are authentic and not fraudulent, but also that these cases are the results of a minority of data centre operators or builders cutting corners and being generally shoddy.
If the national security argument is that important, why not force the operators to accept the use of the Army Corps of Engineers to bring these sites either up to code or adequately mitigated?
Thats a very interesting take, seeing as Shenzhen, China’s tech capital has been constructed (and much run) by the PRC’s Engineering Corpse.
Several of the claims of on-site water pollution that I've looked into were clearly bullshit, basically unrelated to a building being a data center at all; and I have no reason to think that the claims of people being impacted by excessive noise pollution aren't also bullshit - indeed, the most plausible way this could be happening is that some data center operators are using fossil fuel generators to generate electric power in the absence of local grid capacity too close to residential areas, which is also not particularly related to buildings being data centers as such and is more of an indictment of the American power grid. But you can also power a data center with solar panels in the right location and I don't trust that this isn't also a thing people are exaggerating or lying about because random ordinary people have a folk environmentalist hatred of built structures and the media reporting on them is afraid of AI.