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Notes -
This depends heavily on the localtion. Here in Finland electricity currently a big issue. Not because people hate AI (honestly not that many do in the real world) but because it will likely lead to real and significant electricity price increases while providing very limited economic benefits (due to data centers requiring minimal long term workforce and 90% of the cost being GPUs bought from abroad). This isn't helped by the utterly braindead increase of wind power without requiring similar investment in base or adjustable electricity generation (with many coal plants having even been mothballed due to being uneconomic when spare capacity is ignored by the market and regulations).
OTOH nobody sane considers water or space any sort of problems here given we have both in abundance and data centers don't even have any mechanisms that could pollute local waters.
I dont think space is a concern in any large scale area like a country or a state (by anyone non-retarded anyway), but it can be a local concern.
Imagine if you will that data centers have been built in some old industrial area that regular industry has left. There was land prepared away from residential areas, there is power, grid and all sorts of appropriate infrastructure excess that is ready to go.
The data center operators now want to massively expand to meet the demands of AI and they obviously would prefer to do so in close proximity to their original development. Only they have used up the old industrial space so now expansion will start encroaching on areas dedicated to other things or get closer to residential areas where things like noise will be a concern.
In these sorts of cases space can very much be a concern even if it in the context of the larger stage/country wouldn't be. It is appropriate local space that can be scarce, not space in general.
I freely admit I may be biased by how Finland is, but I just don't see that happening to any meaningful extent. Perhaps this is due to planning differences or simply population distribution, but at least over here the union of "old industrial area", "not enough space nearby for expansion" and "cheap enough lot to make building a datacenter from scratch attractive in the first place" is roughly a null set. Any such old industrial areas near (more than a few individual) residential homes that would be at all attractive to datacenter operators are already economically unattractive due to either being valued higher for residential expansion or having abundant vacant land in other nearby sites.
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"Replace shuttered Rust Belt factories with new data centers" has IMO a bit of a nice-sounding vibe to it. Less clear if the infrastructure would be what you want -- less a railyard and more a substation. The telecom connections are probably the easy part. But I don't live in the Rust Belt, so it's not me you'd need to sell on the idea. The "and you have to clean up the Superfund site" is probably a sticking point, too.
Agreed. I see data centers more as something between commercial and very light industrial sites, something like warehouses but with more electricity / telecoms / capital investment need.
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