NIMBYs gotta NIMBY. If it isn’t this, it’s power plants or pipelines. Yet they still want to participate in modern society.
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.
Just curious, how many data centers are being built in the immediate vicinity of the Musk, Bezos, or Ellison mansions? When middle class people oppose a big project nearby that ruins their property values and standard of living, they're "NIMBY", when elite oligarchs do the same, they're entitled to it.
The power plant and pipeline is a bad analogy. We need electricity and gas. We were doing just fine without cryptocurrency speculation, and there's no need for the rest of us to foot the electric and water bill for someone else's expensive playthings.