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Firstly, you're absolutely correct that the water-use and land-use arguments are bullshit and i don't think anyone local really buys any of it, the people making the decisions, that is the local government, chamber of commerce, land-owners, Et Al. are fully aware of how much land and water agriculture uses, and they are used to playing hard-ball when it comes to negotiating the terms of that use in a way the the typical Silicon Valley VC guy is not. I suspect that the water argument is aimed more at urban liberals than anyone else. That said the power grid and associated infrastructure concerns are entirely legit, local communities have either been burned or seen others get burned too-many times to trust in mere promises.
This is exacerbated by the sort of cultural differences you describe with things like NDA's, for someone who's already kind of expecting to get shafted, trying to swear them to secrecy is only going to reinforce that impression.
Finally there is a more general anxiety about AI as an industry, but rural anxiety about AI is a very different beast from urban AI anxiety, Francisco the fruit-picker and Paul the plumber aren't worried about Claude the chatbot stealing thier jobs, or imenentizing the eschaton/singularity they're worried about folks at Anthropic shredding books while trying to enact the villain's plot from Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (or more realistically) they're worried about Flock cameras being used by thier cultural enemies to identify and hunt wrong-think.
I agree. Rural communities correctly believe that their local government will absolutely shaft them in return for short-run gains, and data centers pattern-match to that hard - and in many cases probably are tech companies trying to shaft the community by promising the local government short-term gains. I'm not sure how to fix this except for tech companies explicitly targeting governance trust/quality in their location decisions.
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