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This thing is not that useful to me. The citizen has no reason to believe a datacenter will impact his community positively. The dispute is not that the things won't be useful to the owner or shareholders. The issue is that it won't be useful to those asked to sacrifice for it.
I'm not disputing that, I'm saying that the argument is very often "This thing is not that useful to me, and therefore, to anyone"
I think this is a common pattern, where people who hate something feel inclined to also dismiss everything associated with it as worthless.
A typical example is the surprising overlap between people who hate Elon Musk for his political views, and those who insists that Teslas are bad cars to own, even though these those beliefs feel like they should be uncorrelated (c.f. nobody thinks the CEO of Jeep is a piece of shit just because Jeeps are notoriously unreliable).
It feels like a version of Yudkowsky's arguments as soldiers, where the most vocal haters feel like they cannot admit there is anything good at all about the thing they oppose, for fear that acknowledging nuance undermines their own position. And I think in a lot of cases people internalize these beliefs to the point that they don't recognize how they arrived at them, so they become true to them.
The real opposition to AI datacenters seems to be a mix of general opposition to capitalism/big tech, and specific fear about AI replacing white color workers, shifting political power further from labor to capital, and consequently further concentrating wealth among the richest. I think those concerns are valid, but they are valid only in the sense that the Luddites concerns about industrialization were valid: obviously industrialization was bad for people whose jobs were replaced by machines, but equally obviously society at large benefited from the associated gains in productivity.
Clearly if the AI boom is like industrialization, then we cannot afford to miss the boat, and the discussion isn't about whether AI data centers should be built, but how many, where and who should own them. But acknowledging that makes it much harder to argue against building any particular data center here and now. So instead of taking a nuanced view (data centers can be built, but with reasonable restrictions on emissions of noise and use of water and power), opponents adopt the view that AI is categorically worthless, which makes not building any more data centers the obviously correct conclusion.
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