In my area it’s not the water or the NIMBY factor as must as it is electricity.
Counties, including mine have blocked them recently. The state commissars in Maryland have shut down numerous power plants and are simply buying power from other states. Costs are skyrocketing. Energy sucking data centers will necessarily utilize vast amounts of an already scarce resource.
Maryland is taking a wide swath of farmland under the guise of Eminent Domain to erect power lines to run from Pennsylvania directly to some data centers in Virginia. The farmers lose their farms and the people of the state get absolutely nothing in the process.
Blame Maryland not the data centers. If Maryland shuts down data centers, how are they to blame?
And therein lies the problem. Liberal want a world run on unicorn farts and fairy dust but still want all their modern first world conveniences such as the’ Internet. As so often happens the liberal mindset runs into reality. I wouldn’t want a data center in my backyard, but you can’t have a working Internet without them. It’s kind of like all the college girls with their iPhone, tablets and smart watches who protest against the electrical generation that powers all of them. You can’t power a modern first world country with wind and solar and you can’t have an Internet without data centers.