The water concerns are absolutely overblown, the paper that everyone draws their numbers from had to be ammended because they had a 1000x water usage error.
When a poor town has an empty lot get converted to a data center, they are getting some jobs. 20 jobs of remote hands, plumbers, and security guards is better than zero. And there is increased tax revenue (this point I disagree with, because property tax is wrong and we need a land value tax).
Long term these changes are good.
If you can’t provide that it’s not worth the downsides for the community.
They all love green energy, but will they use that for their data centers in your backyard?
Rules for the and not for me !
They don't leech water, they use less than a single restaurant uses per year. And the datacenter would of course bring jobs in from secondary effects: like new power plants to generate the power that you said would be consumed. And they bring in a gargantuan amount of property tax revenue; Loudon county residents would be paying 40% more if not for DC property taxes.
It takes a couple dozen people to fully staff a datacenter. That's literally a rounding error in employment statistics.
Framing it as an argument against American manufacturing or jobs is complete nonsense.
Recap
DATACENTERS DON'T CREATE JOBS
DATACENTERS DRAIN LOCAL RESOURCES
DATACENTERS DRIVE UP PRICES Of CRITICAL COMPONENTS 5-FOLD
[there are countless more lines but you get the idea]
It is a strong argument against those things in at least three ways: (1) if you want to mandate that high tech manufacturing come back to America (e.g. "just make iPhones here" which seems to be a common sentiment in my circles), it would be foolish to suppress an industry creating insatiable demand for high tech components and ensuring that it goes offshore at a time when other countries are also trying to build more local manufacturing. To say nothing of components and construction materials that are already manufactured here. (2) there are very few types of industry that would create less local environmental impact than a data center, no chance if you think data centers use too much water you'd be okay with the toxic chemicals that chip fabs work with. (3) since America is a high wage country with a lot of R&D strength, any factories we build are naturally going to be much more automated than they are in low wage countries. Being against entire industries because individual facilities don't create enough jobs would probably be quite limiting in the types of manufacturing you'd approve of as well.
<6 months later>
Media: "Americans Don't Like X"
However, a useless media is also a thing and it exists right along side of worthwhile media.
News Media: [Lockstep silence on Gov surveillance before 2013. Mostly silent on Gov/Corp surveillance after. Rarely reports on pols trading campaign cash for law/power]
<2026> Surveillance Is Everywhere and is being deployed against everyone possible.
Public: Increasingly exploited. Seemingly conditioned. Many are giddy after voting for a lying, grifting autocrat. Most don't give a thought to reelecting pols funded by career bribery.
I prefer the news media
that honors it's 1A protections
by actually informing the public.